Beyond Red & Blue

Holyoke goes back to the garden

Corby Kummer writes about Nuestras Raices, a community gardening program in the "Gateway City" of Holyoke, in the new issue of the Atlantic magazine. Read Kummer's piece, but also check out Melissa DaPonte Katz's "A Tale of Two Valleys," from the Fall 2006 issue of CommonWealth, in which she writes about Nuestras Raices and the larger issues of poverty and downtown redevelopment in Holyoke, one of the poorest communities in the state and the most heavily Puerto Rican city on the US mainland. (Another CommonWealth, contributor, B.J. Roche, wrote a piece on Nuestras Raices that accompanied Katz's story.) As Katz wrote:

Over time, Holyoke has become the beneficiary of a plethora of publicly funded health and human services, along with grants to combat its problems with gangs, teen pregnancy, and school dropouts. But local officials are now looking for ways to use public dollars to help the city do more than scrape by. Their goal is to salvage something that was left behind by the industrialists who helped develop the city more than 150 years ago: a canal system originally built to power paper and textile mills by harnessing energy from the Connecticut River.

Kummer's focus is not so much the industrial past but the agricultural future at a 30-acre farm along the riverbank:

Ortiz knows how to cook the vegetables he grows (he told me how he fries eggplant): his father is a professional cook, and “half my friends,” he says, are studying to be chefs at Dean Technical. “Some people think gardening is for girls only,” he told me, “and you should get a real job, like working at a factory.” But “seeing someone popular do it makes it easier.”

So does seeing men grow vegetables during the day and use the gardens as social clubs at night. On summer weekends, there are music festivals on a bandstand built from foraged wood. The pig roasts, tended by men, are so popular that the farm will spin off a lechonera, the name for restaurants and roadside stands all over Puerto Rico that sell spit-roasted pig and traditional side dishes.

Shuffling into Buffalo

Edward Glaeser has a good rundown, from a government skeptic's perspective, on the urban train wreck called Buffalo (well, Boston could have suffered the same fate if not for Harvard and MIT) in the latest issue of City Journal. I was struck by one passage:

...declining areas also become magnets for poor people, attracted by cheap housing. This is exactly what happened to Buffalo, whose median home value is just $61,000, far below the state average of $260,000. More than 10 percent of Buffalo’s residents in 2000, it’s worth noting, had moved there since 1995. The influx of the poor reinforces a city’s downward spiral, since it drives up public expenditures while doing little to expand the local tax base.

It's easy to get a mental picture of a city with declining population (not only Buffalo, but St. Louis, Detroit, and Boston from the 1950s through the 1970s) that emphasizes people packing up and leaving, but Glaeser notes that even failing cities attract a lot of new residents. Indeed, the Census Bureau recorded 65,923 people moving into Buffalo's Erie County between 1995 and 2000 (the last years available) even as 107,038 people moved out. That's only 500 fewer people than the number who moved into Plymouth County, Massachusetts (considered a prosperous, growing suburban area), during the same period. I'm not familiar enough with Glaeser's data to confirm that Buffalo's newcomers are only making the city poorer, but it's daunting to think of a major city hit with a double whammy: the people who move out and the people who move in.

Metro areas matter, says Brookings

Exactly one year before the presidential election, the Washington-based Brookings Institution this morning launched "Blueprint for American Prosperity," a "multi-year initiative to promote an economic agenda for the nation that builds on the assets—and centrality—of America’s metropolitan areas."  MassINC will serve as a partner in this effort to identify key federal roles in everything from transportation policy to higher education programs that can help build a strong and diverse middle class.  This map lets you click on a state to view a profile of its major metropolitan areas.

Land sharks: Keep walking or get arrested

The New York Times reports on the case of a pedestrian arrested for -- well, not being enough of a pedestrian:

According to court documents, a man named Matthew Jones was charged with disorderly conduct ... in June 2004. According to court papers, a police officer "observed defendant along with a number of other individuals standing around at the above location, to wit a public sidewalk, not moving, and that as a result of defendant’s behavior, numerous pedestrians in the area had to walk around defendants."

The short news item is accompanied by dozens of online complaints about slow walkers, cellphone abusers, and people who get in the way on escalators.

This is a real conundrum for those of us who live or work in Boston, especially along the Freedom Trail. Yes, we value liberty and are not fond of laws that restrict personal movement or the lack thereof. But it would make our commutes shorter if tourists weren't allowed to stop and gawk on our narrow sidewalks...

Neighborhood anchors face extinction

Entrepreneur.com has an interesting list of the 10 Businesses Facing Extinction in 10 Years. No surprise that newspapers and pay phones are on there, but a few may be worrisome to those trying to revive urban business districts: Used bookstores, record stores, and (arguably) gay bars. These kinds of businesses, with low start-up costs and little need for advertising, once thrived in neighborhoods that weren't quite affluent enough to attract national chains like The Gap or Urban Outfitters. I'm thinking in particular of Somerville's Davis Square, considered a shining example of a vibrant neighborhood on a public-transit line with an economy based almost entirely on independent businesses. One of them is a used bookstore (McIntyre and Moore), and not too long ago there were two used record stores, all of them conducive to browsing. Can we nurture other Davis Squares without these kinds of establishments?