Month in Review April 2009: Part 2, hail and farewell
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
As we continue reviewing April, the global capital de-leveraging now taking place is having impact at a series of rising steps in the value chain, starting with individual buyers (I was dumb so give me my money back), families (Discreet charm of the bourgeois school), and localities (Bitten in the NIMBY ass).
Mounting the temple of capitalism?
Now moving yet another level upward, we have codependence means coexistence in the relations between US borrowing and the Chinese economy, in Yin and Yank?:
We need each other, whether we like it or not.
So with
I think Chinese influence will still grow, but it has to be different. The Chinese approach used to be, speak
softly and make a lot of money. That’s not working any more. The system is flawed. If
continue to benefit from globalization,
Might the best economic safety be rational interdependence, where each of us is stronger when the other succeeds, and each of us relies on all of us acting in our rational self-interest?
Or am I being Pollyanna?
As Star Trek’s Q himself said, “You don’t get it, do you? The trial never ends.”
“See you around – out there!”
In the continuing realm of urban poverty explorations and theory, I looked at the value of technology in cell phones as a means of locating and connecting the very poor in No fixed e-address?, and finished my six-part series, The ecology of a slum: Part 5, government flows, and Part 6, the future’s flows:
[Continued from yesterday's Part 5 and the previous Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.]
The ecology of slums and the ecology of cities are linked. Slums are an ecology of concentrated poverty; cities are an ecology of distributed wealth. So in cracking the problem of slums, we are cracking the problem of healthy cities, and hence wealthy city-dwellers.
Buildings survive. Many of those called slums by Snow, Chadwick, and Whitehead still stand in
Where did the slums go? As their economic ecology changed, they melded invisibly into the rest of the city.
This is the world that Snow and Whitehead helped make possible: a planet of cities. Page 234.
If we want a planet of cities, we have to cure a planet of slums. We kill a slum not with demolition but with dollars:
To improve a neighborhood, raise the shelter-cost-paying power of its inhabitants.
To do that, raise their ability to earn money, and with it their choices about where to live and what to invest.
How do you eradicate slums? You drive them bankrupt.
The way to win
That’s what Snow and Whitehead sought.
A man who saw the future? Henry Whitehead, 1884
Slums matter, because Childhood poverty damages your mind, a finding that is no longer speculative common sense but is now demonstrable by some meaningful evidence:
Poverty of housing is defined by insecurity of tenure. Fear of losing one’s possessions, fear of violence done in the night-time, all disrupt the brain’s recuperation and growth.
When I left my home and my family I was no more than a boy,
In the company of strangers,
In the quiet of a railway station, runnin’ scared.
Around the world, the great challenge of slums is to provide security of tenure. From that flows capital reinvestment – and, if this study’s findings are right, emotional development of our world’s next generation.
Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters,
Where the ragged people go.
Lookin’ for the places, only they would know.
Insecurity of tenure permanently damages the brain:
Since Dr Farah’s discovery, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of
they have found that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop.
Street children,
As your brain is damaged, you cannot learn; and being unable to learn, you cannot earn.
Asking only workman’s wages I come lookin’ for a job,
But I get no offers,
Just a come-on from the whores on
I do declare there were times when I was so lonesome,
I took some comfort there.
Oooh la, la, la …
Which, in turn, forms the basis for a two-part post that continued into May with an essential idea (not mine) of The embryo house: Part 1, the idea:
Another type of embryo house: the vision
For much of the world today, however, the contractor-built house is a distant dream, as they live in spontaneous communities of self-built housing whose informality extends not just to their legal condition but also their physical construction, as illustrated in this story from Harvard Magazine:
outside
skyscrapers’ shiny glass walls quickly give way to walls around houses, tall enough to obscure fully the
homes they protect. Each block is a patchwork of materials: brick next to wrought iron next to opaque plastic.
People on horseback share the road with cars.
How can we break the self-reinforcing feedback loop among physical, legal, and financial informality? Perhaps by providing people with a formally built embryo house – the smallest formalizable housing unit. Here’s my working definition:
I first heard the term embryo house at the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2005 Bellagio housing conference, where my colleague and since friend Alberto Mulas of
Embryo house,
Mixing the global with the local, I featured an There’ll always be an England vignette in Negative equity: Part 1, glebe land, Part 2, the laches defense, and Part 3, what price farmland?:
In a story that proves there’ll always be an England, in Part 1 we met our plucky, ‘attractively disheveled’ English couple, as profiled in a Daily Mail article, who were being assessed the cost of repairing the chancel on a pre-Reformation church in their vicinity, solely because they owned a 6.5-acre parcel of ‘glebe land’ that carried with it the a periodic chancel-maintenance obligation. We heard their tale of woe and how the singularly unsympathetic Church of England was seeking to extract a sum that by now had totaled nearly £500,000. By that part’s end, we were ready to expunge the glebe land obligation.
In Part 2, we discovered that people can get title insurance for glebe land obligations; that the deed clearly referenced the duty; that the owners knew of it when they bought the property; that the property, which is being farmed as one might say in the medieval manner, would be worth £2,000,000; and that this represents a 48x increase in value over the 39 years the Wallbanks have owned it, making it four times as valuable, in real terms, as when Ms. Wallbank’s father bought it in 1970.
I don’t like the tone of your blog, young man
While you, our jury of readers, ponders your verdict, a word from our pedagogical sponsors, seeking the policy lessons.
1. Glebe law has very fuzzy boundaries. It all began with a polite letter:
And then, out of the blue one day at the beginning of 1990, a letter arrived from the church wardens of
‘We hope that you are well and are enjoying your life in that beautiful part of
it began with ominous good cheer.
Then, in a tip to the past, I profiled my unknown namesake in David Smith, 1918-2009:
No, not your humble narrator – rather one of the many namesakes that we who have such a common name experience. [I was once invited to attend a gathering of the members of the
A houser ’til his death: Dave Smith
This
David L. Smith, a leader in the nation’s co-operative housing movement and locally in the Penn South co-op,
where he lived for 46 years and served as president and chairman for more than two decades, died Sat.,
March 14, at age 90.
As told by this affectionate obituary in The Villager, his life story reveals one of the great policy issues regarding affordable housing, and a subtle unpleasant truth about how it was answered.
Ave atque vale.
Until next month’s review, dear reader
Write a comment