THE ELDERLY PLANNER

 Notes from The Elderly Planner: Years ago, many years ago, I was present at a public meeting in my hometown. The room was packed. I forget what the original topic was, but the discussion turned to affordable housing, back then called "decent, safe, and sanitary" housing.

As public input progressed, a woman in her late 20s, known about town as a "neo-hippie" rose at one point and said, "I don't think anyone should profit from providing an essential human need like housing."

Everyone in the room laughed. I'm sure I did. With each passing year, I have found the statement less funny.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 33 (Cont._2)

Urban planning requires a lot of public hearings. Some are useful, some not. Some are entertaining, some not. Most are interesting. I attended a few during the summer of 1972 while I waited for my wedding day. I remember one in particular in my home town.

The way public hearings were conducted in those days was pretty standard, in most cases. Once the major decisions had been made, the city invited the public in to make comments or ask questions. After enduring what often turned into an ordeal, the city went ahead and carried out its original proposal. Planners would change the approach as years went by, but this was years ago, remember. One might say that we were, back then, approaching the twilight years of the good-old-boy days.

I don’t really remember what the public hearing in question involved exactly. I remember that it had to do with housing, and the room was full. I also remember that major actors in town favored a positive outcome. I remember that some people in the room didn’t.

The first speaker was a young architect whose firm was designing the project. I felt a little sorry for him since nothing in his experience or training had prepared him to deal with hostile audiences. They generally train architects to assume that they know best and to behave accordingly. There were emerging factions in the 1970s that didn’t buy into that. They called them “neo-hippies” and worse things. A group of them were in attendance that night, to the discomfiture of the architect.

They pulled his chain from every direction imaginable. They made him mad when they questioned his judgment. They made him defensive when they suggested revisions. They even made him go red-faced and almost cry when they questioned his motives. Flustered, he introduced the developers. They would know how to handle a crowd of people.

Speaking of the crowd, it wasn’t uniformly hostile. The proponents of the project had assembled a goodly throng of adherents: real estate folks, tradesmen, bankers, wholesalers and others who stood to profit from the project. All in all, it proved a rollicking good time. I felt that way since I had no vested interest. I simply drove down and attended to further my education.

It finally came to the point where a young activist was questioning the primary developer of the project about its possible impact on an adjacent low-income neighborhood. She wore a long, flowing gown-dress, sandals, love-beads, and a flower in her hair. She looked as if she belonged more in Candlestick Park than Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Her questioning concerned the lack of open space in the project and whether the housing couldn’t be built “up more than out.”

The developer answered her in the tone of a parent explaining to a four-year-old why the sun doesn’t shine when it rains. The design followed the demands of maximum economic efficiency. The design would provide maximum housing for minimum expenditures. Any other design wouldn’t be profitably feasible. Were there any more questions?

The woman said something then that produced a wave of laughter from the proponents of the project, as well as from the planning commissioners.

She said, “I don’t happen to believe that one should profit from providing a basic human need.”

The developer chuckled at her in response. The Chairman called the public hearing at an end and a vote hurriedly followed. As the men stood congratulating themselves, the activists marched defiantly from the room. The whole thing made me think.

Her comment sure sounded ludicrous at the time. With each passing year, it sounds less so.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 32

As I waited for August of 1972 to arrive, the firm was humming with activity. We were about to break ground on our first subdivision. It was a small, but elegant thing, based on the current thinking.

Urban planners had decided, for example, that such frivolities as sidewalks didn’t deserve a place in modern America. Who walked anymore? Where would one walk? Neighborhoods would no longer be connected. That might lead to the mingling of social classes and other urban ills.

The disappearance of neighborhood schools was making the motoring of kids more important than ever. Planners spent their leisure hours contemplating how, in the future, they would configure ways to make automobile travel more seamless, even if it meant sacrificing the pedestrian.

Then there was the growing preference for dead-end streets, called cul-de-sacs. Homeowners seemed to like them as they helped keep strangers off their street. Police weren’t so sure because it made patrolling neighborhoods more difficult. Firefighters worried about entire streets being stranded by downed trees or power lines. In large developments, property owners had to carry maps with them to navigate the development.

We called it progress and moved on.

There was also a new generation of home buyers entering the market, the so-called “Baby Boomers,” or those born in the post-World War Two procreation frenzy between 1946 and 1964, much of that time free from the nighttime distraction of television. At any rate, they represented some 20 percent of America’s population, the largest identifiable population cohort in America’s history, also one of the most spoiled, pampered, and selfish. They would impact the economy of the Untied States for decades.

To call them a schizophrenic would fall way short of the mark. As a measurable group, they supported the Vietnam War, but as that same measurable group, they chose, rather pointedly, not to participate in it. 

Their parents, the generation that had survived both the Great Depression and the Second World War, knew full well the meaning of sacrifice. To their credit, and perhaps our country’s detriment, they harbored the hope of protecting their children from trials such as they had endured. The fact that America enjoyed the only fully functioning economy among developed nations, made this possible.

Consequently, the Boomers were neither accustomed to, nor fond of, privation. The so-called “Greatest Generation” had rushed by the millions to purchase modest homes of 800 square feet or less, often in developments labelled as “splintervilles” or some such demeaning term by later wags.

The Boomers, on the other hand, demanded an entry-level purchase of a three-bedroom two-bath brick home, well beyond their level of purchasing power.

Because of such old-fashioned habits of saving and parsimony, parents of the Boomers stood on hand to help their kids purchase their dream homes, often larger and more expensive than those of the parents.

The GI Bill had helped World War Two veterans, who were of Caucasian descent, purchase decent, safe, and sanitary housing in areas where the housing was marketable, if not luxurious. Other veterans did the best they could. That’s where housing stood in my early career. A family’s home was destined to become, for the Boomers, the single greatest portion of their net worth. Choices of location were important, for those who could make them, a distant dream for those who couldn’t.

How did this all affect someone like me? We shall see.

Some neighborhoods were
more desirable than others.

Thoughts Day Three: January 3, 2018

It’s been cold where I live for the last several days, not Minnesota cold, but Arkansas cold. It’s caused me to think. My eyes teared at times.

We’ve spent the cold weather in a 100-year-old farmhouse, for reasons associated with the care of a dependent mother-in-law. The house, her childhood home for a time, was heated for the first 85 years or so by wood heaters. Insulation didn’t exist, nor did underpinning. Double-paned window rattled as the winter winds, and frost, swept through them. One can only wonder.

For those who might worry about us—yeah, there might be a few—don’t. We had the place insulated and, at least partially, sealed-in years ago. A nephew, now a highly successful business owner, and I installed central heat and air, and, worrier that I am, left a large gas heater in place for emergencies. We’re fine.

But what about those who aren’t? Do we owe them anything? Some of my friends now say we don’t. I respectfully disagree. My beliefs, training, and education have convinced me that America will never be greater than the poorest town in the Arkansas Delta. We can talk about the need for the “takers” to fend for themselves and not depend upon the “doers.” But, I’ve never heard of a cold, shivering, hungry, three-year-old demanding that she or he be allowed to “take.” They’re just cold and hungry.

Abraham Maslow would, I think, tell us that once that child was warm and fed, it might progress, mentally and physically, toward a state of being a “doer.” Until then, it will only dwell upon being safe. Wait a few years, give it a gun, and see what happens. What? Oh yes, I forgot.

Excuse me. I’m listening to this as I write and I had to stop for a moment. It is breathtakingly beautiful, and deserves full attention.

Where was I? Oh, on safety, comfort, and self-reliance. I just thought of one the best quotes I’ve read in the last ten years ago. Many folks, especially the writers of editorials in our statewide newspaper, love to quote H.L. Mencken. He was, at various times, a newspaper reporter, linguist, editor, magazine publisher, gadfly, author of books, and chronicler of American life. Raised in an upper middle-class family, he was also a cruel and cynical racist and anti-Semite who supported Germany’s role in World War One and once wrote a comedy piece about the actual hanging of an African-American man. It is still published, to the delight, I fear, of some Americans.

He could also write just about better than anyone else ever did. His most famous utterances fill pages. His works bear reading for their literary brilliance more that their content, although any one of us can use them, much like the Bible, to harvest much that nourishes our embedded prejudices.

My quote? Oh, it is not by Mencken but about Mencken. Alister Cook, in a preface to a collection of Mencken’s works wrote that, “Everything Mencken wrote was from a warm place and on a full stomach.”

I’ve done much in my life that good people would classify as vile and vituperative. I admit to it and spend a good deal of my time now trying to atone. I think, though, I’ve done some things right. I served my country, unlike the Current Occupant. I obtained two college degrees, one while working two part-time jobs while attending school full time, and one by working a full-time job while attending school part time. I’ve been employed or in school since I was eleven years old. I’ve been married to the same woman for over 44 years. I’ve never served jail time nor overspent my income. I think I can best describe my standing among my peers as “a semi-knowledgeable, but harmless old fool.”

Once, I was verbally chastised for telling a friend that I paid my taxes willingly for I believed, as did Oliver Wendell Holmes, that “they buy us civilization.” Do we lose our civility when we allow ourselves to despise paying them for the common good, or as the Galilean might put it, “to feed our sheep?” I’m, for one, afraid we might. We’ll see.

I entered the professional world with no experience, a general degree from a state-supported institution, and with the much-despised image of a Vietnam Veteran. Truth is, though, I started ten rungs up the ladder from an African-American brother or a white sister, either a Harvard Graduate with impeccable credentials, who might have started at the same time.

I was a white male from Northern-European ancestry, you see, the sociological equivalent of beginning from a warm place on a full stomach.

Taker?

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