"A Good Place to be Poor"
Steven Shultis is a founding member of Strong Towns who blogs at Rational Urbanism. Shultis and his family live in Springfield, Massachusetts, a city of 155,000 in the western part of the state, and he is something of an evangelist for the quality of life, and indeed, the rationality of choosing to build a life in an urban place that many of his peers would overlook or dismiss as poor or a “bad neighborhood.” He describes his blog as follows:
The idea behind rationalurbanism.com is to create a site for people who want to live in an urban environment even in those areas where doing so doesn’t seem like a practical option. The goal will be to understand, analyze, and create solutions for the problems of smaller cities and be a forum for highlighting the positives of city living.
We’ve published many of Shultis’s reflections on the strength and resilience of both the place he lives and the life he and his family have built there. If you like what you read below, you may want to check out:
The following essay is republished from his blog with permission.
I feel as though I have been left to sort through the detritus and analyze the pronouncements of a host of prognosticators. Urban America, never short of bogeymen, has become the Big Apple Pie face of COVID-19, and many are predicting the post-coronavirus demise of North American cities. These predictions come both from those who saw the trend toward affluence in places like San Francisco, Boston, New York, and Washington DC as a pestilence and are now convinced these places will become the primary longterm victims of this modern plague—and from those who have seen urbanity in all its guises as fatally flawed and flowing inexorably forward into catastrophic failure.
I have read some interesting responses from urbanists like myself who counter these pronouncements of Henry V at Agincourt with numbers and statistical analysis, with facts and figures. The problem, as is often the case, is that the facts almost don’t enter into it. Unless there is a prolonged, well-documented, and publicized evisceration of the American hinterlands and suburbia—and it takes place concurrent with cities demonstrably overcoming this pandemic and coming back to life—the emotional takeaway from this event (apart from individual tragedy) will be urban crisis.
There is at the end of all of this a giant “however.” And it is this: despite the fact that some Americans prefer suburbia to cities, and have preferred it as long as suburbia has existed, it is not a living arrangement that can be sustained. And simply put, things that can’t go on forever, don’t.
Talking dollars and cents, which is important right now: For my wife and me, our “nut” living here barely rises to $2,000 a month including taxes and insurance and utilities and groceries and all that. Apart from us, and a handful of friends, almost no one who lives where I live “wants” to live here now. Not in the sense that it would show up on a continuum of preferred options, if they were sketching out an ideal reality for themselves. Yet here they are. I am fully ready for the value of my home to drop 50% or more. Given that I must live somewhere, the value of my home was never as significant to me as the cost—and, as a function of that, my ability to use it to make money, whether as commercial space or as an apartment building.
Of my suburban and exurban friends, family, and co-workers, very few have contemplated how they might use their property to produce, create, or at least provide some income. The cost and market value of their properties have been many multiples of mine, and those appraisals are significant to most of them both practically and psychologically. Some of them will be underwater with a 10% drop in home values; all might be with a 30% drop. And they are making multiple payments for cars and insurance adding up to a thousand dollars a month, with property taxes of a thousand dollars a month. Their lives, like our markets, were priced to perfection.
Court Square Springfield, Massachusetts. Image source.
Not long ago, I happened to see that Springfield was very high on a list of cities where people had owned their home for the longest average time. Being honest, that is because values here have been stagnant for decades, and that primarily because it is not a hot, in-demand market. Very few people want to live here, and many who stayed might have preferred to leave—and maybe would have, if their home increased enough in value for a huge Florida-Arizona retirement payday. I don’t think many Springfield people ever felt assured that their home was a ticket to uber-wealth.
Is this an argument against post-virus economic stability in high-cost cities as well? Of course it is, and real estate in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and New York—and many, many other places all around the United States—was in a bubble again long before trouble started brewing in Wuhan. What I don’t know—and what I don’t think anyone can be certain of right now—is which places will be able to recover first from an initial price collapse and general deflation, and then from the stuttering, halting re-localization of industry, a 70’s-style energy reality, and the ensuing inflation (whether “hyper-”, “stag-”, or some other variety).
A large number of people were never going to return to the small, decrepitating traditional Rust Belt cities because it was their first choice. The initial response to this crisis may very well be for everyone who can to either depart or to stay away from cities of all shapes and sizes. But an urge for economic survival may drive people of modest means to cities regardless of preference. As I have said many, many times: this is a good place to be poor. In the past I have thought of that as a description of conditions for the individual, but it is also true for our society at large.
I’m impatient for this stage of the crisis to end and for the next to begin. I would be lying if I said that I haven’t taken a certain amount of pleasure from watching the disaster unfold. No joy at the death and suffering of others, none at all, but rather from the fact that people who not only ignored warnings to be prepared and to expect the unexpected—who were not only dismissive, but who openly mocked me for contemplating discontinuity—are opening their eyes to the obvious fragility of our society.
When MGM was planning construction on its billion-dollar resort a block from my house I asked, as a member of the Historical Commission, if a construction bond would be put into place, to guarantee completion of the project if some sort of economic dislocation occurred before the project was completed: I was literally laughed at. The idea that anything might occur in a three-year window that could completely alter the viability of the plan was unthinkable!
Did I anticipate COVID-19? Not at all. I anticipated that events can take control, and that it is an absolute certainty that, at some point, our tomorrow will not look like yesterday.
Cover image via Flickr.
There’s a certain artistic quality to abandoned spaces—but if we look a bit deeper, these ruins also hold lessons about patterns of disinvestment and policy shifts that have adversely affected American communities.