Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

 

In much the manner of (say) Henry VIII, whose court followed him whither he went, Mayor Tom Menino has boldly proposed moving City Hall to South Boston and reselling the soon-to-be-vacated plaza for a better, more economic use. 

 

Where I go, the court goes too!

 

The move makes total sense: “Great idea!” I said.  And then I muttered to myself,

 

“Never happen”

 

They say you can’t fight City Hall.  But can you move it? 

 

1.         The incumbents’ club will all be against it.  No matter how ungainly, ugly, or inappropriate a building or use is, many people want things to be just as they are.  For instance:

 

“Let me see, how to say this delicately: I don’t think this is a good idea,” said Thomas H. O’Connor, a South Boston native who has written several books on Boston’s history, including “Building A New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal.”

 

“It’s supposed to be a teeming, busy City Hall, and he’s going to stick it way the hell out on the peninsula in South Boston, where it will be all alone?” he said.

 

Personally, I find this astonishingly short-sighted, given that City Hall has moved multiple times in the past, and particularly when Boston is reclaiming its waterfront heritage.  Why wouldn’t we want a City Hall that embraced the harbor?

 

In the same way, if the British government were ever to be truly serious about revitalizing its Midland and northern cities, it would move several large ministries entirely out of London, overriding the howls of protest from comfortable suburban civil servants. 

 

Incumbents, however, can seldom think past the end of their noses.  The emotional parallax that afflicts us all — what matters to me is important to the universe — means that they will see themselves as righteous in their defense of the status quo.  (New York’s nineteenth-century pulling out of the northbound railroad tracks to create what became Park Avenue was greeted with similar howls of outraged incumbency.)  And the power of incumbency is never stronger, nor more fiercely defended, than when held by the bureaucrats.  Emperors come and go, the mandarins console themselves, but we live on forever. 

 

 

Time and again I have seen well-meaning, smart, dedicated whirlwinds of innovation descend as if by political parachute into the secretary or leadership role of a large HUD-like bureaucracy, only to find themselves, eighteen months later, thwarted, deflected, and worn to a frazzle at their inability to move the mental sacks of cement about them. 

 

Mayor Menino is a long-time incumbent, so he knows what he is up against.  But when the whole building is against you, it’s astonishing how hard can be even the simplest, smallest movement.

 

2.         There’s no transportation infrastructure, and the incumbents will oppose adding some.  It’s a common farce of modern urban politics that better neighborhoods resist bringing mass transit for purely parochial reasons.  So Washington’s Metro doesn’t go to snooty Georgetown, and Los Angeles’ vaunted subway fails to reach LAX, as for decades San Francisco’s visionary BART stopped well short of SFO.

 

Currently, residents can easily get to City Hall by taking the Blue or Green lines to Government Center, or the Orange or Red lines to Downtown Crossing. To visit City Hall in its new location, residents would have to take the Silver Line from South Station to the Silver Line Way stop.

 

There are several stops at or near Government Center,

Pronounced “gummint centah”

 

That’s presuming we have current transportation infrastructure.  It would not be the end of the world to divert the Red Line into South Boston — such a move has been long overdue.

 

It took a Globe reporter 21 minutes yesterday to ride the T from Government Center to South Station and then the Silver Line to the proposed location in South Boston.

 

Good gracious, 21 minutes.  Yes, that’s certainly a reason not to relocate city hall.

 

Important principles of urban and housing policy

 

This not-yet-tearful tale offers up four useful principles of urban and housing policy:

 

1.         Cities evolve, so their buildings must evolve too.  City Hall, like many a building of that era, was a conscious expression of government’s desire to wipe away the overgrown ground-gripping past, and scrape a palimpsest onto the center of a city that most intelligentsia thought was moribund if not dying, as the manufacturing jobs that had sustained the nineteenth century urban expansion were fleeing south, west, and overseas.

 

Instead, something astonishing happened.  Cities hit bottom in about 1975 and have been rising ever since, reinvented as information hubs, social spaces, where live-work is increasingly the norm not of the small artisans and garment workers who populated the tenements, but of the information geeks whose innovations have created much of the last half-century’s wealth.  Cities are messy, as Jane Jacobs memorably and repeatedly wrote, and that messiness defies the antiseptic perfection of urban-planner vision.

 

Corbusier thought Paris would look good in concrete

 

Among the great differences between the US and Europe is that our downtowns have never held such truly ancient churches and monuments that they must be preserved, so that with our American enterprising impatience we are more than willing to tear down buildings and put new ones in their place.  It’s chaotic but it’s lively and it has fueled the regeneration of American urban cores where many European cities have turned theirs into tourist showpieces, with business activity elsewhere.

 

Maybe flattening the old Scollay Square and replacing it with a big brick and cement civic statement was the right commitment for 1959.  Today it’s anachronistic, and it’s time for the space to be reinvented once again.

 

2.         The worst mistake you can make is bad construction.  Buildings are exoskeletal, and when the exterior envelope is both heavy and rigid the building is inflexible and unadaptable to future uses.  Sure, no one in 1962 foresaw the rising price of energy, no one foresaw the emergence of broadband, and no one saw that the Central Artery was a horrible mistake one day to be torn down to reunite the city with the waterfront.  But anyone should have seen that unanticipated big things were going to occur.

 

The whole concept of indoor plumbing was originally too radical

 

Visitors to England (or the continent) may be struck by the spiderweb network of pipes that snakes along and about the gutters, downspouts, and walls of English stucco semi-detached homes.  Why are they exposed?  Because the building envelope is fixed. 

 

It doesn’t matter that Le Corbusier was celebrated as a visionary, he was fundamentally stupid to create a public structure that cannot change either its external or internal configuration without massive expense.  (A similar charge can be leveled at massive Frank Gehry-type buildings such as Atlantic Yards.  It looks great in the CAD/CAM, but what if your economic and demographic projections are wrong?  Then what?  Leave the breathtaking design for single-use, single-owner buildings like opera houses.)

 

Just don’t change a thing, outside or in

 

3.         Government proves its political commitment by action, not words.  The mayor can talk all he wants about how he wishes to revitalize South Boston.  He can urge on the redevelopment of Fan Pier (still pending, as far as I know), but if he wants to demonstrate the city is truly invested, actions speak in a language words do not.

 

4.         Over time, what becomes valuable about a building is not the tangible but the intangible assets.  The value of City Hall is that it is the seat of city government, not its bricks and cement and electronics. Indeed, from a pure real estate perspective, City Hall’s occupancy of the site has negative value, in that it prevents the site from being developed to its highest and best use, and in that way also probably leaches away a bit of value from the abutting properties and places.

 

The same principle applies to very old housing properties (including public housing, as I described in The Gordian Knot).  The physical buildings themselves are often obsolescent — tiny bathrooms, inadequate plumbing, aluminum wiring with too little amperage capacity, undersized bedrooms, narrow corridors, kitchens too small and with inefficient appliances.  Yet the intangible assets — incumbency, a healthy community and a happy resident population, streams of subsidy, and financing place — are of great value. 

 

Subsidy portage means moving the intangible assets into a new tangible home.  It’s fully viable economically — all that’s needed is the political commitment to make the policy and programmatic changes to enable it to occur.

 

Moving City Hall is just subsidy portage applied to a different type of asset and a different customer, one who has some control over his financial resources and his political prospects.

 

Conclusion

 

Often enough I’ve kidded Mayor Menino; here I tip my hat.  He’s thought big, and I hope he pulls it off. 

 

But if I were a betting man, I’d bet against it.

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