Fair Fouls

The Administration of the New Mexico State Fair, the Governor's Office and the Downs at Albuquerque made a grand mistake in the way they agreed to present a request for proposals (RFP) in 2011 for a new 25-year lease to own and operate a Racino at Expo New Mexico.

First, 30 days is just too little time to create a creative, thorough and thoughtful proposal of such complexity and duration. 60 to 90 days would have made much more sense.

Second, the Downs is intimately embedded in the culture of the Fairgrounds, especially the horse business which occupies a significant chunk of the Fairgrounds. Regardless of the change in the Governor's office in 2012 and the concomitant change in the General Manager's office at the State Fair, the culture of the horsemen hasn't changed. But the Downs logically shuffled their management to look much more Republican in the face of the state's Republican leadership and their notoriously highly politicized practices.

Third, the Downs has prepared sophisticated proposals over the past several years of how they would rearrange the Racino to better fit modern gambling with failing horse racing. So they have always been well prepared to deliver a new proposal at a moment's notice.

Where does that leave Laguna Development? They were dealt a weak hand.

This set of circumstances leaves the Interim General Manager who has to put on another Fair in two months in a weak economy and a lean staff, in a highly stressful position. I don't blame him, unless he is a complete political hack. Never met him. Probably never will. Hope he puts on a good Fair in 2012.

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

Frugal Apartheid?

The Tea Party Right Wing Press rails against “Green”building and infill development as tools for the Rich to conspire to oppress the Poor. Their mistake is not that Green building is more economical to own and operate than conventional construction, but the assumption that there is a upper-class bias and conspiracy to hurt the poor and working families in Albuquerque by "gentrification" under the guise of "green construction." Developers build in a regulated market and serve those who buy. Global climate change threatens the rich and poor alike in the desert Southwest. We need to change the rules of the market, empower the poor and work together to reduce our “ecological footprint” to create a greener, more frugal and more sustainable city. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we can hang together or we can hang alone.

The self-proclaimed defenders of the poor point out the systemic failures of conventional land development for working families in Albuquerque – they drive “jalopies” to their affordable houses on the suburban fringe of the city, far from their jobs across town or they live in old decaying houses in old decaying neighborhoods that are "ripe for redevelopment.". And the poor have to shop at cheap warehouse stores to live. “Drive‘till you qualify” is the formula today. But it costs a lot to drive every day to a low-wage job and to shop the cheap big boxes, and the price is rising. These are not problems caused by any “urbanism”new or old, but by the conventional suburban sprawl of Albuquerque and other post-War cities. If we talked about the total cost of housing and driving in the same breath, we could create a new city of opportunity. The Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago, www.cnt.org has developed such a formula.

In every American city today, there is a range of housing from 5-acre ranchitos to 1/10-acre townhouses and apartments. Even with that range across Albuquerque, we need to add more housing opportunities for ourselves, our children and our parents. No one can afford every house on the market. Along with McMansions and subsidized, 3-bedroom apartments for poor families, we need more small accessory apartments (for our mothers-in-law and children), new townhouses, new flats (aka condos) and new casitas for more households to enjoy the opportunity of convenience and even home ownership in a growing city with rising land values and growing wealth.

We shouldn’t sneer at the success of yuppies and empty-nesters and others who can afford to live Downtown or in EDo or Nob Hill and ride their bikes to buy a latte. Not everyone wants to live there with limited parking and too manytouristas. Some buyers want a 1-acre estate in Los Ranchos or Corrales. But most people would love to afford that Starbucks’ latte.

We need to keep working families in our sights as we re-build Albuquerque in the 21st Century. They are the key to maintain the social complexity and richness that sustains our city. The rich can afford to buy anything. Social and economic diversity is essential to a great city. All the complaints from Libertarians and Tea Baggers about “oppressive”government regulations don’t change this fact. We need to build equity in the city as we grow.

We cannot expect that gated enclaves for the rich and “Section 8 Housing” for the poor someplace else will build a city. We need all household types, classes and income levelsin relative proximity to enable great civic places. We need assisted-housing policies and techniquesof many kinds for the poor, our children and our elders. We need non-profit developers, land trusts, cooperatives, and the state, city and county to get involved. In simple terms, we need to regulate a city where secretaries and teachers can live next to the children they teach and their employers.

We need to cut through the bureaucracy, to eliminate senseless regulatory barriers, and promote innovation wherever possible. We need a land-value tax policy that rewards investment and new housing inside Albuquerque today. But we run into the constant challenge that there are two things people hate - sprawl and density.

One critic decries a conventional townhouse development on a former landscape nursery next to a city reservoir and across the street from garden apartments. The fact is, the site is miles away from the jobs the future residents will work. The problem is not that the new townhouses will cost a lot of money to build and buy, but that they will cost a lot to own and operate. The price of gasoline is over $3 per gallon today. What will home buyers up there do when gasoline costs $5 per gallon and the bus on Montgomery runs less than 3 times per hour during workdays? Why can’t we build new housing near new jobs or new jobs nearer housing? These are policy questions that can be answered by the city council IF the neighborhood associations want to participate.

We need to take a longer view of all of Albuquerque. What will the city look like when gasoline costs $5 per gallon or more? That time is coming. How will we get to our minimum-wage jobs in our jalopies that the Tea Baggers worry about? How will we afford to shop at Wal-Mart when the nearest self-proclaimed “SuperCenter” is 5 miles from home and Wal-Mart has to import their stuff from China at the same price per gallon? The neighborhood market with local produce and the bus and bike look better and better, but will they exist in that brave new corporate future where five Walton heirs own more than 30 million Americans?

The world is flattening, but it is also rising, and not all of us can rise with it, no matter how much education CNM offers.

It’s not that there are“eco-elitists” out there discriminating against the poor in a latter-day “apartheid.” The world as we have built it is driving down wages and rewarding the rich and the low-wage Chinese workers. How can we reduce the cost of our American lifestyle fast enough to compete against India and China? They’ve got the high-tech jobs today. We don’t. They are teaching enough of their high school children the math skills they need to succeed in today's working world. We aren't.

The city and county will never ask developers to provide housing in every development for all classes, from the homeless to the executives of PNM or UNM athletics. We need to find more middle grounds, a range of housing for each neighborhood that is comfortable for buyers. Former Albuquerque Mayor David Rusk offered a strategy that he found in Montgomery County, Maryland since 1976 –require 10% affordable housing in every subdivision. Add effective transit, and it will work in Albuquerque, too. Montgomery County trades a density bonus for those affordable units, one for one. Courts have found that to be a fair deal for both the county and the developers. The key question here is whether the neighbors will ever accept such heresy. What benefits does the city need to offer them in trade?

Montgomery Blvd. offers that opportunity, as do Lomas, San Mateo, Coors, Menaul, Lomas, Eubank, Central and 4thStreet to select a few key arterials. But this means that we will allow more housing, higher densities and more opportunities for residents today along those corridors, not more restrictions.

But these new homes must be less expensive to own and operate, and that means they must be “green.” So the key for “green building” to serve the needs of the working poor is for us to create incentives to balance the upfront costs of better construction and higher density housing near jobs with economic returns for the builders and developers. It may take tax credits or cash rebates or discounts from the state, city or county and location-efficient mortgages for the buyers to make this happen, but it can be done as a matter of public policy. We need to reduce the tax cost of improving land, but tax the value of land itself (as real estate brokers say, the value in land is “location, location, location!”) We must kick-start very energy efficient construction through stricter codes and appealing tax incentives. The very steps the Republican City Council chose to vote against.

Public officials have a kit of tools they can use to allow developers to create a market for new housing and jobs. We need to expand that kit as far as we can afford to and not simply remind everyone that the market discriminates against the poor. The role of government is to find the best balance between taxes, services, subsidies and support for the rich and poor.

We shouldn’t claim that “green building” is the new apartheid in Albuquerque when green building saves everyone money (and the environment) over time. We must create the public policies that fulfill this equitable and sustainable vision for Albuquerque and New Mexico before our time runs out.

A version of this essay was published in The Albuquerque Tribune in 2007.

Remembering a Vanishing Legacy

New Mexico is hurtling forward into the future, leaving the past behind. The New Economy is definitely faster than the old one. The one we grew up in. It is easy to forget the lessons learned by our predecessors as the memory of each generation fades. Architecture can endure, but even buildings disappear from both the landscape and our memories – if we forget to teach our children.

It takes time and patience to study the past and discover its meaning in the 21^st Century. Kathryn ‘Kit’ Sargeant, a sparkling anthropologist who thought a lot about our local past, died Christmas Eve  2001. A deep memory of our history left. She led studies of old plazas and pueblos and wrote the book with Mary Davis, Shining River, Precious Land, a collection of oral histories of the North Valley of Albuquerque, and a way of life rapidly disappearing as we grow our last crop of houses.

Her friends, neighbors and colleagues know her tireless efforts to rediscover and record the remnants of the Spanish Colonial and Native American settlements throughout the Valley around Albuquerque. This is a past we seldom think about. But she lived with it at home, actively exploring a Pueblo ruin found in her own backyard. She had patience and enthusiasm for the work of discovering the mystery of who these people were and how they lived here in a world before us.

Our modern era is marked by a contempt for the past, for the old ways of doing things. World War I and the Great Depression certainly shattered the promises of the 19^th Century. The past failed us. World War II and the explosion of new technology and the race to space convince many that the future can only be better than anything we did before. So why bother? Henry Ford told everyone, “History is bunk.”

Kit Sargeant certainly held onto the past and reminds us that it is worth remembering. The past has a truth. In buildings, our predecessors discovered solutions in adobe that we still use today. Almost no one today tries to build a pueblo or a hacienda, but those enduring buildings reflect a response to culture, climate, materials and technology of their time.

History teaches modesty, when, for example, a student discovers that “primitive” Egyptians built stone pyramids that were not surpassed in scale for over 3000 years – and finally we have our own Big I! That the Anazasi lived and disappeared from the southwest and the fact that we are standing on ruins of our predecessors should give one pause. Who will stand on the ruins of Albuquerque in 500 or a 1000 years? There are no guarantees of success against drought or pride.

From our Western past, there are lessons of form, order, scale and rhythm in buildings, lessons that are still taught in architecture and design schools across the world. But much of our architectural history is now derided as mere style – the Classical, the Gothic, the Baroque, and now even the Modern. We race through Post Modernism and Neo Rationalism to Deconstructivism. Chaos Theory is popular, too.

At the same time, homebuilders here offer Pueblo and Territorial and California Contemporary houses that look oddly alike (as they all have two or three-car garages in front). Much of the similarity is driven by the economy of construction and the technology available. Everyone builds in wood frame. Stucco is available everywhere. People like pitched roofs, and clay tile is a nice upgrade from asphalt shingles. Adobe is unique here in the Southwest, but not economical.

We have invented a new world today based on our technology and cheap water and gasoline. This is a world far beyond the history of 5,000 years of human civilization, where we race farther away from each other than ever before. The communities of the past in the deserts of the Rio Grande Valley or the Jordan River Valley were much more compact and more locally self-sufficient 2,000 years ago or even 500 years ago than they are today. They weren’t sustainable, though. Part of their failure was the lack of technology and the abundance available then and now from someplace else in times of drought or disaster or war.

As New Mexico struggles with today’s recession, and our climate endures a new cycle of drought, our future may look much more like our distant past. Now that we have built our Albuquerque, the challenge may be to retrench and rediscover how our ancestors survived through their difficult times. Hard lessons learned.

Today, in the middle of a new record year, it is time to dust off Kit’s book and research on old plazas and pueblos, and think about the past. The race begins tomorrow, again.

A version of this essay was published in The Albuquerque Tribune in January 2002.

Healing Albuquerque Through Creation

As we build and grow Albuquerque, we should help heal the world. This seems like an immodest proposal, but the alternative is not appealing. Do we really mean to wound the world with our creations and our lives? We need to create a way for developers, planners, engineers, architects and landowners to do the right thing.

We worry that our growing city is increases isolation, makes people fat, segregates the rich from the poor, wastes too much gas and water, and simply uses too much farmland and open space for what we get in exchange.

In Judaism there is the goal “tikkun ha olam” - to heal the imperfect world that God created. In Christianity, there is the directive to serve as stewards of all Creation. There is also the belief from the book of Genesis that Man has dominion over the natural world, too. The Bible also calls for us to live in harmony with the rest of God's Creation. Healing, stewardship, domination, harmony. It’s hard to do all of these at the same time, while making a living in today’s America under today’s rules and economics. Rape and pillage seem to be the current economic strategy.

Then there is the hope that every act of creation will be an act of redemption. Pretty high stakes for a homebuilder or a real estate developer and their attorneys, architects and engineers, not to mention the EPC or the CPC.  When did you ever hear them talk about creation and redemption in a public another pro forma hearing.

The problem of applying a faith-based moral directive to real estate development and developers is the incredible range of credible interpretations of “healing the world” here on the ground in Albuquerque - from closing the door to newcomers to buying "open land"(aka farms and fields banked for future development with low ag rate taxes) for new residential or commerial development to tearing down existing failed buildings to building bike trails to erecting Wal-Marts and affordable housing in Valencia County.

It would not be easier to try to secularize the program and call on developers to simply make Albuquerque more enchanting. But if Albuquerque were more enchanting, the world would be a better place to live. What on Earth does Enchanting mean? Charming? Homey? Traditional? Welcoming?

These questions have come into the news with the debates over “what would Jesus drive?” Since the most sophisticated vehicle of the Roman empire was a chariot – the HMMV of its day - it is hard to extrapolate to the 21st Century. Way back then, most everyone walked, especially in the colonies, and no one had car insurance. Jesus demanded that his followers give up their worldly possessions, so it is hard to argue that he really would drive a new truck with an extended cab and the finest Cummins engine, or a van that seated 13 or even a Prius. Perhaps in His modesty, He would risk His life and walk. But in today’s America, can you imagine Him walking everywhere? Most Americans don’t walk, even on their Sabbath.

Now the world is much busier and much more complicated than it was 2000 years ago, sort of. But the stakes really haven’t changed.

Let me return to the idea of enchanting. Here's my definition of an enchanting New Mexican neighborhood:

First: the cars and trucks are subdued. When they enter the neighborhood, they slow waaaay down, They have come home, and the drivers know there are children, chickens and pets about. And when they arrive at their houses, they disappear behind the houses, not into a ginormous automatic two-car garage door. The houses have porches. They meet the "girl scout cookie test" where you would trust your daughter to walk up to the front door where you could see them to ring your doorbell and offer to sell you their cookies.

Second: Imagine the current reality of the snout house side door house where the front door is the two-car garage door, and the entrance for the homeowners is a hidden side door where you the visiting parent cannot see your daughter from the street.

Third: Imagine a neighborhood where your children can walk to their elementary school and bicycle to their middle school. And somewhere inbetween there is a store where they can buy an ice cream bar and bring it home before it melts.

Name one remarkable neighborhood in Albuquerque where you can live this life. The life that we lived in the 1950s.

A version of this essay appeared in The Albuquerque Tribune in December 2004.

A series of passing thoughts.

Airbus wants to build a great factory in Mobile, Alabama simply because they know that Alabama offers cheap non-union, unregulated labor. Some come the end of the airtravel bubble that's beginning to rise, the Mobile mobile will be the first to close, Joy, oh joy. 1,000 jobs in 2016, and then what in 2022?

Will Airbus become the Republicans new best friend in their military, commercial and congressional alliance?

Obviously that's part of their goal here. They want cheap American non-union labor, you know, the guys who have the choice to work for less. And they want to endear themselves to the chickenhawks in Congress who buy their toys. What a effing joke we have become. Eisenhower warned us long ago about the threat. Too bad Karl Rove, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and their teabagging ilk have sold their souls.

As Johnny Carson said years ago, "More to Come."