Berta Propagandist

If you want to change your city, what is the best way to go about achieving such change? Say for example, you wanted to improve conditions for the poor and homeless. Seems to me that there are 2 basic approaches, either you can speak about the need for change or you can begin making the change yourself. There is honor in both approaches. Sometimes a non-profit group, say the Drop Inn Center will do both. They will feed and house the homeless, but also be vocal advocates for change. And in different periods in the organization's growth they will do more of one or the other.

But say you stick with the vocal advocate role, and pride yourself on advocacy and protest. What is your strongest weapon? Truth. It is my contention that if you are speaking truth to power, then you better make sure of your facts. In advocacy, if you lack the facts, if you just demonize and repeatedly attack the enemy without facts, then you become just an annoyance, an ineffective propagandist.

And so I come to Berta Lambert:

Here is Berta, holding a sign claiming something for which he has no evidence at all. It is pure propaganda.

On July 19th, the Park Board cut down a dead tree in Washington Park. My wife happened to be walking by and took a picture as they started:

It was an American Elm tree, planted during a memorial service for Buddy Gray in 1996 shortly after he was killed. I never knew that this was a memorial tree, there was no plaque or anything, but my wife concerned about the trees in the park, took a photo.

That morning when they were beginning to remove this tree, Jim Burkhardt a Manager with the Parks Department was there. Jim is an arborist by training and he said he planted the tree in 1996 at the community's request and now he unfortunately had to remove it. I've met Jim several times at different public forums, and he seems to be exactly what you want in a City employee. He loves Cincinnati, and he is completely dedicated to his work in the parks. Oftentimes his job involves removing dead or diseased trees.

The tree It wasn't very big, it was obviously dead, (click on the picture for a bigger view where you can see the leaves are all gone). Did 3CDC have anything to do with this? Highly unlikely. They have stated at numerous public meetings that they will be removing dozens of trees, many of them older and larger than this. They have not started any of the park renovations. They have no reason to kill a single tree out of dozens they plan on removing. The Park Board completely controls the park up to the point sometime in the upcoming months when construction starts.

How many lies can you fit in one simple sign with only 5 words?

So I also noted some of the other signs Berta was displaying:

And this is another annoying sign. Pat Clifford is nothing if not totally dedicated to the Homeless in Cincinnati. Berta is upset that the Drop Inn Center board is supposedly in negotiations with 3CDC and the City about moving the shelter. But there are no details on this. Maybe they will be going to a bigger location. Maybe they will be getting better facilities. Maybe they will stay. I have no idea, and neither does Berta. I trust Pat and the DIC board to do what is best for the residents of the shelter. They always have.

Later Berta put the tree sign down where the tree was cut. Notice the car parked in the grass!!?? Some things never change.

Summer Doldrums

I thought I would just ramble a bit for fun:

I've been feeling very disconnected from downtown so far this summer. My work currently keeps me out of the city 5 days a week, and any time outside of work and sleeping is pretty much spent at our pool which is a 12 minute drive out of the basin. Now with the temperatures getting even hotter, I'm sure we will continue going to the pool everyday. In the evenings sometimes we will sit out on the stoop and talk to neighbors, or we will go to the Saturday movie on Fountain Square. Tomorrow, the movie is Astro Boy, which I have never even heard of, but we probably will be there. Unfortunately, lots of events happen around us (like the Fringe Festival or Taste of Cincinnati) that we don't even know are happening until they are over.

I was troubled to hear about a seemingly random shooting in the 1700 block of Vine a few days ago. Despite all the condos, retail and general positive business developments in Over-the-Rhine, it is still quite dangerous north of Liberty Street. In the southern half of OTR, I feel pretty comfortable on the street with my family. We can hardly walk half a block without meeting friends and stopping to chat. But if we walk a few blocks in any direction, we will be mostly amongst strangers. Even walking over to Main Street to go to Shadeau Breads, it seems like we don't know anyone over there.

One of the great stabilizers on a street are the people who are there all the time. Mostly I am thinking of the shop keepers, like Mike at MiCa or the lady at Ice Cream Palace, but also the maintenance man next door and even some of the homeless guys or the Tender Mercies residents and staff.

Washington Park almost seems like a dead zone lately. There are still lots of people hanging out, but the dusty gravel lot and the empty swimming pool deaden the whole north end, and the broken play equipment has been baking in the hot sun. Seems like the park itself is a patient sullenly awaiting surgery...

While on a recent road trip, I listened to hours of podcasts. I listened to several good ones from Citybeat and I also listened to a backlog of James Howard Kunstler. Kunstler is interesting, but seems to have really gone off the deep end with his predictions of our approaching worldwide catastrophe triggered by peak oil. His best book was his 1994 Geography of Nowhere, which although now a bit dated, you should definitely read if you haven't. (I'll give away my copy if you email me). But for the past decade or so Jim has been focusing more and more on oil. And although oil is an extremely important subject for our society, especially seeing that our entire economy is based on its production, I am not comfortable with his far-reaching predictions of the future. He thinks that the past 50 years of American suburban, cheap oil motoring is an anomaly, not a predictor of the future and that we will return to a localized agrarian economy.

I have to admit that when he first started writing about this stuff he himself was an anomaly. But now he is just one of a growing chorus of people predicting peak oil and a resulting economic collapse. I agree that oil is certain to get much more expensive over the next decade. But people will adapt, and oil use will decline as it gets more expensive. There will still be oil for critical industries and fertilizer production etc...

Meanwhile we continue to re-shape our built environment for this uncertain future. We continue to build and re-build our cities. I read somewhere that it is predicted that 50% of what will be standing in 2050 we will build between now and then. We must remember that even though most of our population currently lives in a sprawled out unwalkable wasteland... we can change our path. We can change our path to build beautiful, productive, healthy and walkable cities. We can do this one step at a time over the next decades. And to accomplish this, we must recognize that development naturally follows access and transit. This means if we want a beautiful city with public space meant for people, then we must build durable infrastructure that supports pedestrians first. In my humble opinion, if we support the pedestrian we will automatically build a great city.

That's all today. I predict that my posting will be a bit sporadic this summer (I refuse to take a laptop to the pool) but I'll be around at least weekly if not daily. See you on the street!

Car Addiction and Oil Tragedy

Where is the outrage at the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico?
Eleven men were killed, the water continues to be polluted, wildlife
is being killed, fisherman cannot fish, globules of congealed oil are
beginning to wash ashore, and most of us just shake our head say "what
a shame". And there is no outrage, because we know that the real
culprit is us. Our demand for oil, specifically cheap gasoline,
caused this tragedy.

Gasoline is subsidized and the price kept artificially low by
politicians that want to get the suburban and rural vote. Shortcuts
are taken on safety and oil companies are subsidized to keep oil
cheap. Lets be honest. If gasoline was priced to truly reflect the
external costs: the environmental damage caused by spills, the wars
waged to secure supplies, the human costs of the instability of
countries like Nigeria, Venezuela, Iraq, the disease caused by
exhaust, the cost of the US Navy constantly patrolling the Persian
Gulf and guarding every tanker, and the surface excavation of
thousands of acres of pasture to procure tar-sand, and the smog, and
the carbon emissions, to the costs of local spills, local damage done
at refineries and gas stations etc etc...If all these costs were truly
figured into the cost, a gallon of gas would be totally unaffordable.
Yet, it is political suicide for a politician to call for even a
modest increase on the gasoline tax, even when the reason is that the
current tax doesn't even cover the costs of interstate road
construction and maintenance!

In the US, over the past half century, we have reconfigured our
patterns of settlement, our cities and our countryside, to a paradigm
that is fundamentally supported by one thing: cheap oil. And this
paradigm is so ingrained into us that we don't even see it anymore.
And there is no substitute, no affordable replacement to run our
254,000,000 cars. You cannot run hundreds of millions of
rubber-wheeled vehicles on used french fry oil or hydrogen or methane
or solar or whatever. Americans have a communal delusion that when
oil starts to get expensive, we will solve the problem with nuclear
powered cars of some sort that will allow us to continue driving
everywhere. But this is delusion. We have to wake up to the fact
that we made a mistake, a huge mistake in re-developing our country
around the automobile. It is time to kick the habit, time to live in
walkable places, and a modest start would include increasing the
gasoline tax.

Northgate 40% Vacant and Bankrupt

I was just on the Enquirer website and made the mistake of reading the comments on a few stories and was (again) completely blown away by the ignorance and hatred of both our city and of our fellow citizens.

Someday, and it won't be long, those people who think the city is a sewer and that Northgate Mall is is going bankrupt because it went "ghetto" will wake up and realize that the world has changed, and doesn't revolve around their old high school rivalries. While scrounging their next meal out of a cheeze doodle bag in their mold-infested "finished" basement they'll get their fat ass out from behind their TV screen and car windshield, and maybe actually walk on a sidewalk and interact with strangers.

Look, malls are history. A new mall has not been built in this country for years. Northgate is not vacant because black people started shopping there. It is vacant because we have too much ugly sprawling crap-selling retail stores, and you keep building more.

Wake up! This is a wide, diverse and beautiful city, and everyday downtown is getting better.

Time to decide: join the crowd and move further out ...or beat the crowd and return to the city.