Blame an Architect.

 

I’ve been reading a book called Brave New Home by Diana Lind. It is about housing in America … no, wait, come back! I promise, it isn’t as boring as you think! It’s more a work of Sociology than anything else. Yes, it is about housing, but really it is a history of the way modes of housing interact with our lives in a society. It is about how our spaces shape the lives we live inside of them.

For instance, for most of human history, some kind of multi-generational home was the norm. This made a lot of sense because people didn’t usually move around that much and it actually made living easier because the work of the home was distributed among many people. Grandparents watched the kinds while the parents were out hunting and gathering, etc. This persisted (with exceptions, of course) for most of our time on this planet.

Let’s fast forward to the post-World War II housing boom in America: this is when things really start to change. The Industrial Revolution produced pretty squalid and terrible housing because that’s when people became commoditized as simply “labor” and the living conditions were terrible and over-packed and this is where much of our housing code started, which was a good thing at the time. In the era after World War II, there was a pretty dramatic shift toward the single family detached home. Culturally this had to do with a movement away from the cramped industrial housing of the urban tenement house, but also was a result of the fact that farm boys who’d been drafted and survived the war didn’t want to go back to the farm. Not when the GI Bill would send them to college and government-backed loans allowed them to own their own homes. It is really this period from the late 40s onward that shaped the American idea of what a “home” should be, because that idea had not really existed in this form before that.

Now fast forward to now. Now we know that a whole bunch of single family homes, private, accessible only via car, closed off from the world with big backyards and useless front yards have altered our sense of the individual’s (or the individual family’s) place in society. You can’t sit on the stoop with your neighbors when you have no stoop and have never met your neighbors.

In James Howard Kunstler’s fantastically bitchy book The Geography of Nowhere, he really goes in on the idea that mandatory housing setbacks (how close the house can be to the curb) caused the flourishing of the green front yard with its picket fence, but that they destroyed the community life of the neighborhood.

Lind makes the argument that the idealized “privacy” of the single family home created a mindset that bled over into down market housing like apartment buildings, basically our entire society became about minding one’s own business in the residential sphere and that is reflected in the design of apartments now as well as housing.

The book makes a lot of really good arguments about how ecologically disastrous our current forms of housing are, but this thread about how they have had deleterious effects on the social and community lives is the one that is really connecting with me at the moment. She connects the inbuilt privacy of our housing designs with the increasing epidemic of isolation and loneliness, which we know now translates to actual erosion of health and which (apparently) has been linked to earlier deaths. She even says that smokers with a lot of friends live longer than smokers with no friends, which I thought was interesting.  

I think about this a lot because the walls of my apartment are so thin and poorly insulated that everyone in the building can hear what everybody else is up to. I can hear not just when my downstairs neighbors are having a party, but when they sitting down to dinner. It is always odd to be able to hear so much of these other lives so near my own, but to not be a part of them. There is a line in a poem I have always liked that goes, “almost being there/is a kind of punishment” and that is a little bit of what I am describing here.

In the Robert Putnam book Bowling Alone, he talks about the collapse of American social communities (like churches, bowling leagues, service organizations like the Rotary Club, etc.) have contributed to the splintering of our society into ever smaller and more isolated groups and that idea basically wrote the check for Putnam’s whole career. While I think he was correct, Lind’s idea about the design of our housing working like castle gates to keep us apart from others, seems like a far more practical explanation for some of the ills in our culture.

I think that Roman Mars and 99% Invisible have taught us all about the importance of the design we never think about. I’m writing this the same day I have a physical therapy appointment to work on the pinched nerve in my neck caused by spending 14 months hunched over an impromptu work desk in what is now my office and used to be a guest bedroom. Design and intention matter.

I could go on and on on this topic, but mostly this morning I just wanted to tell you that if you ever feel lonely, you can probably blame an architect, as this is obviously all their fault.

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Dispatches from My Life Now.

I have been in Portland less than two weeks. It feels like I am at summer camp. It does not feel like I live here. I think it is possible though that one day it might feel that way. I never really felt like I lived in LA even though I lived in and around it for almost ten years.

The abstract notion of living in Portland has been very exciting. Not because of the Portlandia, hipster, Brooklyn-of-the-West stuff, but because I’d learned about the way the city had consciously planned itself. I learned about the “urban growth boundary” instituted to minimize sprawl, I’d read a little about their zoning which emphasizes mixed use development, I’d read that their zoning generally requires that on urban and commercial streets there be windows at street level in order to avoid the creation of lonely, unpleasant urban canyons. Detached housing is required to have a smaller setback from the sidewalk, which means that your very livings space is closer to the people moving around in the city, making life part of the city, not isolated from it. Homes do not have the wide, useless front lawns I’m accustomed to in California. Here, in the 1970s, they actually removed a freeway to create the Waterfront Park that runs along the western bank of the Willamette River. Can you believe that?! They REMOVED a freeway! They must have known that dirty truth of civil engineering: that additional freeways added to urban areas tend to create more congestion, not alleviate existing congestion.  

I used to bitch and moan a lot about what a poorly planned and un-livable place greater Los Angeles is. Portland seems to have done all the things I said LA needed to do. I’m not trying to create an LA vs PDX binary here - after all, the population of Portland is about 600,000 and the population of the LA metro is about 157 gazillion, so the comparison would not be a terrible fair one - I am just telling you what I’m experiencing on the ground.

Speaking of which, because I have not had much to do these past two weeks, I have been doing a lot of exploring on foot. I have always liked to engage with a place at the ground level. Here are some some things I have discovered lately:

POLITICS. That Pacific Northwest libertarianism I’d heard of is very much real, though I imagine that anyone possessing it would object to the label “libertarian” because this also seems to be such a liberal place. More than once I have heard the distinction made between “Bernie Democrats” and “Hillary Democrats”, as though that is as the length of the political spectrum here. I heard a local politician described as “too conservative for Portland” because he is “more of a Hillary.” I’ve seen college students with “Big Government Sucks” buttons while walking around the beautiful campus of this (rather expensive) state institution. I can’t get my finger on the pulse of this yet. They are repelled by Trump-ish nativism nationally, but deeply angered by the influx of other Americans into their own city. A city which is in many ways a victim of its own success. It is precisely because of the heavy handedness of their municipal government that this city is as beautiful, livable, and appealing as it is, which is why people want to live here. I understand them though. At a party the other night I met three separate people who were evicted from their apartments in 2013. Apparently that was a very bad year to be poor in Portland because the influx of out-of-state people and money drove landlords to develop some new strategies. The big old houses out in the neighborhoods of Portland that had long since been sliced up as rental spaces were suddenly worth more (again) as single family homes and the resulting sell-off was essentially incentivised by the fact that the city had no rent control and no mechanisms to ensure that landlords were behaving fairly and ethical, because no such laws had ever really been needed before. Anyway, I am still trying to figure all that out.

PEOPLE. Despite the politics of it all, people really are very nice here. It isn’t a hug-convention on the bus or anything, but people are polite, personable, and seemingly genuine. Even friends-of-friends I have never met have been amazingly generous with their time and information. I’m humbled by it. I have been the recipient of more generosity in my first two weeks here than in my first two months in LA.

PARKS. There are parks everywhere! And I have not even explored very far beyond the South West quadrant of the city. They take their public spaces seriously up here. There are big parks, small parks, urban parks, nature parks, you name it, they got it. Every day I walk down to the Pioneer Courthouse Square and every day there is something happening there. A farmers market, a protest, a band, there is always something. And people just sit around, they simply spend time in the public realm and it really is as community-building as it sounds.

WATER. Often those parks have water in them. This place loves its fountains. I can think of five parks within easy walking distance of my apartment that have water features for children to dance and play in. It must be lovely here in the depth of summer. Jumping water and dancing water and waterfalls and wading pools. The drought-stricken Californian in me is still freaking out about it.

HOMELESS. Okay, real talk here for a minute. There are a lot of homeless people here. Now I will admit, this is the most urban that I have ever lived and there is always a degree of homelessness that goes along with living in the core of a city. But I have been to other places. I have been to Downtown LA and I have been to Manhattan and Denver and I spent the last few months in Ventura (which has a large homeless population), but somehow it does seem like the homeless population of Portland is by percentage larger than it should be given the population of the city. I will say that some of the homeless population here seems to be shockingly young and able-bodied and is likely tied to the general influx of people into the PDX area. That, coupled with the housing problems I described above, likely has a lot to do with that nativist sentiment I also described above. To its credit, the city seems to be aware of the homeless problem, but does not seem sure of how to deal with it.

MASS TRANSIT. I am a lover of mass transit and down in the city center where I am there are no less than THREE SEPARATE forms of mass transit. And that is not even counting the orange city bicycles you can rent all over Downtown. I can be standing IN THE AIRPORT in less than an hour because the light rails runs straight into the airport. I have been to each quadrant of the city in the last two weeks and it was always cheap and easy to get where I was going. I have sold my car, so confident am I in the mass transit here.

MALLS. So far I have not encountered a traditional shopping mall. I’m sure that they exist somewhere, but I have not found one yet. The local Target occupies the second and third stories of a building Downtown. I found a fantastic street out at Burnside and 23rd that is like a deconstructed shopping mall. It is as if developers (hampered by the city zoning requirements) took a small town main street and filled it with the stores from a mall, but without evicting any of the small business that existed there. So the effect is a street of six or seven blocks that has an Urban Outfitter next door to a local coffee shop, next to a Lush, next to a pub. The result is charming (and tourist-friendly) and contributes to that ongoing theme of public spaces.

TRASH. I am so confused by the trash situation. Here is what I can gather so far: recycling must be divided between “glass and jars” and “paper, metal, plastic, bottles, and tubs”. That is not that confusing on its own, but my building only has places for the recycling. I am still trying to find my dumpster. ALSO, my apartment came with a composting bucket. It is a plastic tub with a lid and a handle. It looks like a small cooler. This is for anything organic or tainted by the organic, so coffee grounds, egg shells, corn husks, or what have you. No idea what I do with the bucket once it is full.

DRINKING. There are bars and breweries and pubs everywhere. If one were so inclined one could drink all day every day until they simply died. I can walk either north or south and have a beer in my hand in less than two blocks. It seems to just be like that here.  

BUILDINGS. Remember how a couple years ago there was that article (was it in The Atlantic?) about how the Pacific Northwest is due for a big earthquake? Do you remember how freaked out people were? Being from California I was all like, “What’s the big deal?” Well now that I have gotten the chance to look at Portland, I see what the concern is: in the case of an earthquake, this place is fucked. Everything here is built out of brick or nice old flaky wood. I would like to imagine that the fancy newer buildings that have sprouted up along the river have some earthquake resilience built into them, but I suspect that unless the state or city requires them, why would a developer spend the extra money? The pretty, old, tree-lined neighborhoods I’ve seen on the east side of the river are just going to collapse like Lincoln Log huts. The narrow one-way streets of the city center would become impassably choked in the event ruble spills out into them. Walking around the city I have seen brick and stone foundations cracked with a century of freeze-and-thaw cycles. Even the poured concrete foundations I have looked at seem insubstantial, but I am not a civil engineer. I’m just a guy who likes to worry. OH! Let us not forget that since they have “weather” up here, most houses and buildings apparently have heating oil tanks in their basements. So that surely won’t cause a problem when the big one hits.

BUILDINGS (Part II). My apartment does not have a shower. It has a tub. Only a tub. The building is so old that the bathroom was not built for a shower. The walls are just regular plaster walls. Hypothetically if I somehow installed a shower head (which I am explicitly barred from doing), the walls would quickly start to peel and wilt. This means that I am taking a lot of baths and since I always liked to shower in the mornings, it means that I am sometimes taking a morning bath. Like I’m fucking Henry VIII or something. It feels weird and wrong. I’m not sure that I will ever get used to that.

I think that is all I have to tell you for now ...

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