I just wrote a column for America magazine about population decline in the United States and how to prevent it. Hint: "Given the limitations of family-friendly government policies, there is no way to stave off population decline without turning to immigration, which accounted for more than half (55 percent) of U.S. population growth between 1965 and 2015."
And people may forget that for a good part of the 20th century, between the highly restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 and its essentially being repealed in 1965, the number of immigrants in the United States steadily fell. (See my crude chart below.)
After I shared my column with a Facebook discussion group (a closed group, so I can't reveal comments), some people countered that it would be a great thing for the planet if there were fewer people living on it. This reminded me that decades ago, I wrote an article for the Boston Phoenix arguing that Boston’s severe population decline was a threat to its economy and quality of life, earning me angry letters from people complaining that the subway was still too crowded and movie lines were still too long. Unlike places like Detroit and St. Louis, Boston has since stopped emptying out and started to grow again. Its revival has come with increased economic inequality, but would it be better off with if its exodus had continued?
There could be environmental benefits to lower or negative population growth, but it will also come with lower economic activity (why invest in a declining market?), lower tax revenue for social services and Social Security, and a shortage of workers, including health care workers who care for the elderly. And the environmental benefits are not uniform: When there are fewer people on public transit, the unavoidable solution is to reduce or eliminate public transit.
So there are trade-offs in any scenario. And people in Detroit and other major cities can tell you that population loss does not usually improve the quality of life.
If population decline is in fact necessary save the planet, we may have to accept a period of little innovation and declining living conditions (i.e., fewer consumer goods being produced by fewer workers). There is no scenario in which no one suffers.If population decline is necessary, we may have to accept a period of little innovation and declining living conditions (i.e., fewer consumer goods being produced by fewer workers). There is no scenario in which no one suffers.
The rents in my apartment building are going up again this fall (new living situation needed, in Boston or New York!), and my mother is indignant enough for both of us. “I can’t understand it,” she said last week, as we discussed the scarcity of apartments near Boston subway lines that rent for less than $2000 a month. “How could they have gone up so much?”
I didn’t have the heart to reply honestly: “You’re the reason rent is so expensive!”
With my father in a nursing home, my mother now lives alone in a house, within walking distance to the subway, where six of us lived a few decades ago. Her best friend lives a few blocks away in a house where five people used to live. There must be tens of thousands of comfortable homes in walkable neighborhoods in the Boston area where big families have given way to elderly people living alone. This is one reason there are so many children in my apartment building, including the monster upstairs who seems to run around in circles at night like a crazed cat. When there are so few houses on the market, more young families have to compete with singles and couples for small apartments.
In 2005, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey played into the stereotype of the heartless Republican when she suggested that many elderly people in Massachusetts were “overhoused,” with property-tax breaks for seniors only encouraging them to live alone in huge houses. The Boston Globe’s Raphael Lewis captured some of the outrage:
“Reading in the paper about what the lieutenant governor said last week, it was quite upsetting about how seniors should just move out because they only use one room out of your whole house,” Leola Coleman, 74, of Mattapan said to Healey.
'”But I think we should have the privilege to do that if we want to,” Coleman said. '”And you know what I mean, like we have to leave and give up our homes because of the baby boomers.”
Oh, those arrogant baby boomers, living in their fancy crowded apartments and looking askance at people who allegedly use only one room out of their whole house. What would they have the good elderly folk of Massachusetts do with their millions of rolls of gift wrap? (And we’re not really talking about baby boomers coveting houses anymore; they’re now old enough to be the ones who refuse to go.)
I don’t blame my mother for not wanting to move. If she sold the house, she’d only have to deal with the same ridiculous rents and home prices that the rest of us face. But if all the widows and widowers in the Boston area sold their houses at once, we’d get somewhere. Many of the houses would go to young families now in apartments. Some of the houses would be subdivided into apartments or would be shared by students and other young adults. (Cities and towns would have to permit this re-use; posh suburbs like Dover and Weston would undoubtedly ban the disgusting habit of housing more than one person per acre.) At the same time, some of the widows and widowers would move in with other family members, and some would get apartments with roommates. The overall result would be a reduced demand for apartments, and at least a slowdown in rent increases.
There will be no exodus from too-big houses any time soon. Homeownership is too precious to people who came of age anywhere between the Great Depression and the early 1970s. In the 1980s, comic Kevin Meaney made a running gag out of his mother fretting, “We’re gonna lose the house!” It really is an obsessive fear among American working-class families, even when it’s unlikely that the house will be passed down to the next generation.
And though this may change as more people live in apartments for longer periods of time, Americans never seem satisfied with the amount of room for their stuff. As the Washington Post recently reported, “living space available per person has doubled over the last 40 years,” the result of the median home size going up (from about 1,500 to 2,500 square feet from 1973 to 2013) and the average number of people in a household going down (from three people to just over 2.5 people over the same period). In fact, the living space per person has quadrupled or quintupled over the past 40 years for seniors who remain in houses where they once raised families—but that means the living space has shrunk for families who cannot afford houses and have to compete with young singles for apartments.
Since we’re not going to force people out of their homes, a more reasonable solution is to build more housing in desirable areas, including apartment buildings in neighborhoods with public transportation. That’s been happening to some extent in the Boston area, and my mother is all in favor of that. But most of her homeowning neighbors, in a city just north of Boston, are of the NIMBY persuasion, and they loudly oppose new apartments and the “transients” they attract. (My own building, in a formerly all-commercial area a block from the subway, has 11 stories, and that was enough to scandalize the city into imposing height restrictions to make sure it never happens again.)
I get it. A big, quiet, almost empty house is a reward for raising a family, and it hardly makes up for the cost, the work, and the heartaches of shepherding three or four kids into adulthood. But please don’t accuse me, struggling to come up with enough money for a cozy one-bedroom apartment, of bringing down the tone of the neighborhood.
Lean into it, Boston.
I know, you’re depressed by two weeks of frostbite temperatures and more than five feet of snow. You’re furious to discover that your public-transportation system is just a movie set, always ready to shine in its scenes with Matt Damon but incapable of getting people to work in bad weather. You’re flabbergasted when you hear the phrase “world-class city,” and you can more easily imagine Death Valley as a suitable spot for the Olympic Games.
But this crisis brings an opportunity.
Boston has a reputation for rudeness, for uptightness, and for excessive punctuality. This winter, God, and the MBTA, are telling us there’s a better way. We don’t have to go on Caribbean cruises to get away from the clock. We can take this once-in-lifetime rebranding opportunity and turn Boston into a city so laidback that San Francisco will go mad with envy.
Forget “the Hub” and “the Athens of America.” Our new slogan will be “You’re in Boston: Don’t Sweat It.”
We can stop worrying about Harvard and MIT graduates skipping town and taking their talents to Austin or Seattle. Imagine if local biotech companies pursued the most promising minds in cancer research by saying, “Your interview is at 11 a.m., but I know you live on the Red Line. So you’ll get here when you get here. Don’t sweat it.” Boston’s Financial District could woo the best and brightest of the Millennial Generation by telling employees, “It would be nice to come in before the stock market opens. But we know that’s not going to happen. Just shove enough people out of the way to get on a train before noon and we’re good.”
Do you have a social obligation you’d rather skip? Don’t sweat it. If a co-worker invites you to her baby shower, stay at home with Netflix. The next time you see her, say you tried to get there but your Orange Line train broke down because of a gum wrapper on the tracks. Tell her about the eight miles you had to walk through dark tunnels (the tinsel on the gum wrapper shorted out the electrical system), dropping bits of your homemade cream-cheese brownies the whole way to keep the rats from crawling up your legs. In another city, your co-worker might respond, “But I didn’t see anything about that on the news.” But in Boston she’ll remember that on the same night, a switching problem resulted in a commuter train crash that killed most of the Red Sox—while they were in the middle of a game in Fenway Park. A dead Orange Line train just isn’t worth a tweet anymore.
Marijuana is going to be legalized in Massachusetts anyway, so let’s do it now. At 4:20 p.m. every day, the entire MBTA can pause while passengers and crew take a mental-health break. Wait, what? You’ve got a plane to catch? You’re late for your shift as an emergency-room nurse? You’re trying to stop a wedding because you’re in love with both the bride and groom? You’re in Boston. Don’t sweat it.
Oh, you’re late for a meeting with the governor? If you can get a signal, call and tell him you’re stuck on the T. That’ll shut him up right quick.
The Washington Post ’s Roberto A. Ferdman writes about the success of “fast casual food,” a type of counter-service restaurant that “has grown by 550 percent since 1999, more than ten times the growth seen in the fast food industry over the same period.” The best-known example of the genre is the burrito chain Chipotle, with Panera and Shake Shack also thriving.
What does “fast casual” mean? “It’s surprisingly hard to define what it is exactly,” Ferdman writes. One industry analyst reels off 10 criteria, most of them vague (“food that is wholesome”) or not exclusive to Chipotle and company (you can get “flexible offerings” at Burger King if you insist on it). He does not mention the key characteristic of fast casual restaurants: They don’t have poor people in them.
Ferdman does write that fast casual places are more expensive (“$9 to $13 dollars per receipt, compared to an average ticket closer to $5 for fast food restaurants”), but Chipotle fans gingerly avoid the effects on the chain’s clientele. It’s supposed to be the fresh ingredients that keep people coming back, not the tasteful clothes of the customers.
I go to Chipotle a lot, as well as to Boston-area fast casual chains like Boloco and B. good. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King are off-limits to me, as is New England’s beloved Dunkin’ Donuts. One reason is that the fast casual chains do tend to have healthier options (such as vegetable alternatives to French fries), but equally important is that they so much more pleasant to spend time in.
Continue reading "Is it anti-democratic to eat at Chipotle instead of McDonald’s?" »
My Christmas present from my landlord was a $75 rent increase. Someone slipped the notice under my door while I was microwaving lunch last Saturday. There was a 90-second period when I couldn’t hear the paper sliding across the carpet, and the management took advantage of it.
The $75 increase is on top of the $100 increase I got in September, when I signed a six-month lease as a way of pushing ahead the inevitable. I was planning to move in the fall, and I got as far as putting half my stuff in boxes and transporting winter clothes to my parents’ house (which I’ve had to retrieve), but the looking was too daunting. I’m now looking for a place to live, a job, and a boyfriend. I’ll get around to that last one when I can offer to share senior citizen discounts.
The rent increase was also a birthday present. I turned 51 on Christmas, which makes me 16 years older than anyone on staff at Vox.com, one of the new data journalism sites helping to make newsprint look ridiculous.
As I get older, I’m taking after my father—a man who yells at my mom for letting the phone ring twice—and getting increasingly impatient. Slow walkers, many of them half my age, drive me crazy. People who can’t get to the point of a story fast enough have me clenching my fists. Unfortunately, this includes my mother, who insists on telling stories chronologically instead of using the inverted pyramid style I was taught in journalism school. (“Why is there glass all over the floor?” “Well, your sister was coming over today, so I decided to make brownies—” “For Christ’s sake, just tell me if anyone got hurt!”)
NPR reports that getting a drink in California may become a more sterile experience:
Bartender Cameron Hall hadn't heard of a new California law that bans culinary workers from touching uncooked food with their bare hands.
The rule applies to bartenders, who are now supposed to wear gloves to put limes in the mojitos and cherries in the Manhattans — even to scoop ice into a glass.
[...]
What would be the hardest thing to do with gloves on? Hall answers, "Shake hands."
The law could be a boon to psychiatrists, now able to offer a less clinical atmosphere in which people can vent about their problems.
I hope this law doesn't spread to Massachusetts. I was once at an almost empty restaurant where the bored bartender passed around samples of his homemade pickled vegetables, his hands dripping brine everywhere. One of the best nights out ever.
There is an effort in California to exempt barenders from the rule, but if it fails, some restaurants may want to make the gloves a feature rather than a bug. They can follow the lead of an eatery in Latvia featured on the website Fun Fever:
A unique, weird restaurant has opened in Riga, Latvia named "Hospitalis." It is a must-see place if you like gore things. The restaurant looks like a medicine cabinet, while you are treated as a patient and taken good care by the long-legged waitresses in nurses uniforms.
The food is served in flasks and operating-room’s dishes and isn’t that cheap (7 and more lats per meal), but this is a bizarre experience that is worth breaking the bank. Besides, the place is owned by local doctors, but unfortunately, the president of Latvia, who is also a doctor, declined his appearance at the opening once he realized how weird this place actually is.
That description is a bit judgmental, no? Maybe the straitjackets for customers are a bit much, but the skirted nurses' uniforms could catch on here, especially if nondiscrimination laws mean that male servers will have to wear them too.
Photo of Hosptalis from Fun Fever. I know that the bartenders aren't wearing gloves.
We hate cupcakes now. This year, we'll be entranced by hot pieces of bread topped with homemade Smuckers. The toast will start out thick, then get skimpier as the craze spreads from city to city. Eventually, the buttered toast made from bread heels will become $12 tapas ($2 extra for a dusting of Ceylonese cinnamon).
Pacific Standard's John Gravois reports on the trend from San Francisco (in a piece that somehow swerves into an examination of schizo affective disorder):
The coffee shop, called the Red Door, was a spare little operation tucked into the corner of a chic industrial-style art gallery and event space (clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Evernote, Google) in downtown San Francisco. There were just three employees working behind the counter: one making coffee, one taking orders, and the soulful guy making toast. In front of him, laid out in a neat row, were a few long Pullman loaves—the boxy Wonder Bread shape, like a train car, but recognizably handmade and freshly baked. And on the brief menu, toast was a standalone item—at $3 per slice.
It took me just a few seconds to digest what this meant: that toast, like the cupcake and the dill pickle before it, had been elevated to the artisanal plane. So I ordered some. It was pretty good. It tasted just like toast, but better.
Watch for a toast bar in your up-and-coming neighborhood! But don't bother setting up a Tumblr account; Fuck Yeah Toast got there first.
As with so many things, Bob and Ray anticipated this. See the ad for House of Toast after a promo for another type of business that's sure to pop up any day now:
The blog Very Small Array has a cool map matching neighborhoods in Queens to neighborhoods in Manhattan with equivalent rents (go to the site to see a bigger version). It got me thinking how rents in Boston neighborhoods compare to those in New York City. Where could you live in the Hub if you were willing to pay the same as residents of Brooklyn Heights?
It will take me a while to figure out how to make a map, but listed below are Boston neighborhoods paired with NYC areas that had similar median monthly rents as of November 2013. The data is from Zillow Real Estate Research.
Nothing in Boston matches Tribeca ($4850), DUMBO ($3950), or NoHo ($3895). But the Hub’s most expensive neighborhoods edge out the West Village ($3525), Chelsea ($3495), and the Upper West Side ($3450), and Harlem ($1895) comes in between Brighton and Roslindale. And our Chinatown is more expensive than New York’s Chinatown.
Keep in mind that these figures are for median rent. The rankings would be different using sale prices for houses and condos. For example, West Roxbury has high home values, but it doesn’t have a lot of luxury apartments. It’s also probable that some of the neighborhoods in central Boston have higher average rents, skewed upward by some very pricey buildings; the median rent instead indicates the point at which half the apartments are more expensive and half are less expensive.
Continue reading "Where you can pay New York rent in Boston" »
On the occasion of Bill Bratton's return as New York City police commissioner (and he was Boston's commissioner first, you Hub-haters), Pacific Standard's Lauren Kirchner notes that the "broken windows" theory has lost some of its shine since Bratton first served under Rudy Giuliani. The gist of the theory is that when low-level crimes (graffiti, subway fare evasion, etc.) go unchecked, the atmosphere of decay emboldens criminals to commit more frequent and more serious offenses.
Kirchner writes that academics have dialed back the praise for the Giuliana-era crackdown on taggers and panhandlers:
Many critics of broken windows have pointed out that violent crime fell in New York at the same period of time as unemployment dropped and the economy strengthened — surely factors at least as important as the disappearance of squeegee guys. An influential 2006 article in the University of Chicago Law Review by Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig argued that the falling-crime trend in 1990s New York ran parallel to the natural waning of the crack epidemic that had ravaged the city in the years before. Other researchers found from their experiments that disorder does not cause crime; rather, disorder and crime co-exist, and are both caused by the same social and economic factors.
The broken-windows theory was certainly overhyped. But perhaps it was also a successful bluff, or self-fulfilling prophecy.
Continue reading "Rocks thrown at "broken windows" theory" »