American conflict

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Tennessee 40 years ago today. We owe a great debt of gratitude in this country for his extraordinary commitment to the healing of a crippled public conscience, still on-going, and for the personal sacrifice it came to.

In the last few weeks The Baltimore Sun has been running a number of articles about the events of urban upheaval that followed King's killing. Stories, photos, & video looking back at the destruction in Baltimore and at societal & individual change that accompanied are collected here.

Also in the Sun a couple of weeks ago, one account of the very different scene that week in the state capital, Annapolis, twenty miles south of Baltimore. The article covers the first showing of a film about the consequences of the unusual friendship between Roger Moyer, mayor of Annapolis in '68, and Joseph Simms, a black man with whom Moyer had had a basketball rivalry during high school, in prison for theft in April of '68. Take a look at the film's site: Pip & Zastrow, An American Friendship.

The new consumption – take 2

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas — roads, sewer and water lines — cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.

The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families — and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

From the March Atlantic, an article called "The next slum?" (Might've caught this sooner if I'd been paying attention.)

Author Christopher Leinberger goes on:

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built.

There's certainly truth in that. (Though I wonder what he means by "little upkeep" on those older houses — especially in an era of high inflation in energy costs.) If you work on houses of varying ages, as I've been doing for some years, you know well enough about the relative solidness of a pre-WW2 house.

As an aside, it's worth noting that on the whole, American residential construction has always gone more for short-term value than long. And on this question of general decline in quality, at least, (like a good writer) he paints conditions a bit more dramatically than they warrant. His last line in that paragraph comes near absurdity: "Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall — their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up." Actually, American-style wood framing is a good construction system, and methods of today achieve increasingly impressive structural performance in those "thin wooden frames" — when the methods are followed, that is. And drywall is never relied on for structural value, because it essentially has none.

Supersized houses & the new consumption

From a Hartford Courant article (via 'Residential Tuesday') on the apparently accelerating 'not so big house' market shift — some cautions and a trend projection for the longer-term:

But there is also plenty of evidence that Americans' appetite for large homes continues. The average size of new homes built in recent years is still edging upward, said Gopal Ahluwalia, staff vice president for research at the National Association of Home Builders. He expects the average to level off soon around its current figure of about 2,500 square feet.

"They are not choosing smaller homes," he said. "People are not choosing mansions because of the capital cost, the running costs, but they're still choosing bigger homes."

Home buyers increasingly want higher ceilings, open floor plans, more fireplaces and windows — all features that require more energy to heat and cool the house, Ahluwalia said. And, he said, many Americans are still willing to live far from work and shopping.

Arthur C. Nelson, who has studied housing trends for 20 years, expects that to change in coming decades, with sweeping repercussions for American society.

Nelson projects a surplus of between 3 million and 22 million homes on large lots — built on one-sixth of an acre or more — by 2025. This will be driven by a swelling tide of empty-nesters, young professionals and young families who choose to live in cities or in the first ring of suburbs outside them, Nelson says.

He foresees these big homes in the exurbs eroding in value, and then becoming homes to a much different clientele than today.

"I think what's going to happen, and I'm seeing it anecdotally already as I talk with people, is that these large homes are now being occupied by multiple families, extended generations of immigrants, low-income households, typically family-related," Nelson said. "The trend is so new, but my guess is we'll begin to see this kind of outcome coming out statistically in the 2010 census."

Costs of War

And the one question I ask here, in terms of the cost of the war, 620,000 deaths in a population of 30 million people. If you standardize that for today’s population of roughly 280 million, that would be the equivalent of about 5 million deaths, or 100 times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam.
    I look at that, and it’s absolutely horrible; no one would disagree with that. In the book Time on the Cross by Fogel and Engerman, they do a survey of emancipation in this time period, and they find that dozens of countries, including the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, the French and Danish colonies — dozens of countries ended slavery peacefully through some sort of compensated emancipation.
    Now, of course, the standard argument is that this could never have happened here, we could have never have done this. But I don’t see any reason to believe why British slave owners valued their slaves any less than American slave owners did. They didn’t want this. The British government paid them off 40 cents on the dollar. It might not have been possible in 1861, but I think in terms of the sheer amount of the death and the total destruction of the economy of the country, North and South. The North took a huge economic hit as well as the South. The one big quandary is, why didn’t we do what every other country in the world did during the previous 50 years that ended slavery, and end it peacefully through compensated emancipation?

Thomas DiLorenzo, from a fascinating discussion about Lincoln and the Constitution and the politics of Lincoln's Republican Party's abolitionism. The discussion's a debate, in fact, held by policy group the Independent Institute (what a name!) in 2002, between DiLorenzo and the Claremont Institute's Harry Jaffa.

From later in the session:

TD: Well, Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island asserted the right to secede from the Union as a condition of ratifying the Constitution. And they asserted that right for the other states as well, and they were allowed into the Union after doing that, and so, that is one thing that happened.

HJ: That is absolutely wrong. It’s just flat-out wrong.

TD: Well, they did. I quoted the Virginia thing in my —

HJ: They did not speak of secession as a lawful right under the Constitution.

TD: Sovereignty. Sovereignty.

HJ: It was an exercise of the Right of Revolution, which they had recently exercised under the British Constitution. But you simply, stubbornly refuse to recognize that there’s a difference between secession as a Constitutional right and revolution as a natural right.

TD: I disagree with that, and I just —

HJ: No, you’re wrong. [Laughter.]

TD: I think you’re wrong.

HJ: You’re just wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Fun!!

Urbanisms

A feature in this month's Architectural Record puts alongside one another six short interviews with architecture critics writing from six cities across the U.S. — Following, excerpts from four of them.

Robert Campbell, Boston Globe:

Campbell views the hot topic of sustainability as perhaps finally putting an end to the debates about arcane design theory, and becoming a new version of what had been considered Regionalism. "Sustainable design is a great opportunity for architects to sell themselves as environmental experts," he says. While sprawl is not as much a concern in Boston — a well-developed historic city — as it is in faster-growing cities, Campbell says the biggest environmental concern for the city remains the prospect of rising water levels, which he sees few architects addressing. "I can’t believe people are still developing big buildings on the harbor near sea level," he muses. He also laments the view that high-rise buildings are the only answer to increasing urban density in the name of sustainability. "The density of Paris is just as high, if not higher, than cities that have tall buildings," Campbell says. "In Midtown Manhattan, where every block is a single building with a single door, it becomes oppressive."

Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune:

Kamin surveys the landscape of contemporary American architecture and sees a lot of Modernist projects he considers "one-offs," buildings that visually register within a city but don’t always contribute to street life. Exceptions include David Chipperfield’s Des Moines Public Library, which Kamin sees as part of an overall strategy of enlivening that city’s downtown. "The city is a project that takes generations to realize," he says. "To think that architects alone have the silver bullet that will change a downtown’s fate is ridiculous." But Kamin says more architects need to stop getting caught up in style wars and the obsession with sustainable "gadgets" — to borrow the Chicago architect and urbanist Douglas Farr’s terminology — that have the tendency to marginalize the profession. "Sustainability and architecture are ultimately about how we are going to live," he says. "You can’t ignore the small picture, so, yes, buildings should be green, but the real architects are the planners, politicians, and people who write codes."

David Dillon, Dallas Morning News:

Echoing most critics, Dillon says affordable housing remains a challenge for architecture. "If you ever wanted a real laboratory for developing affordable housing and prototypes, New Orleans is it," he says. "But what I’ve seen mostly is just a lot of New Urbanism stuff that doesn’t seem to get to the real problems of accessibility and affordability." Dillon, in his teaching role at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, studies affordable housing in the U.S. "It’s not a style exercise; it’s a community-building, economic exercise," he says, explaining why high-design architects don’t pursue the arduous process of piecing together funding for such projects. "Dallas is 40,000 units short in terms of affordable housing, and the houses built by Habitat for Humanity and community development corporations don’t even begin to touch this need."

Christopher Hawthorne, L.A. Times:

"People are starting to lead more local, circumscribed lives, because it takes too long to drive to the other side of town. Much of the appeal of L.A. has been having access to the whole area — Malibu, Santa Monica, downtown, Pasadena," he says. Traffic jams, more planning, and more regulation "may well change the local myth of architectural freedom." For the past 30 years, architects like Gehry and Thom Mayne have drawn inspiration from industrial construction and the commercial strip, redefining what is ugly and what is beautiful. "We’ve been evaluating architects in Los Angeles on the basis of expressiveness and virtuosity. I don’t know if that’s appropriate anymore." With the new generation of L.A. architects working on tighter sites where freestanding expressions are less possible, "we may need a new way of thinking about these designers and whether they’re succeeding. Their work may be less loud, less in-your-face."