Ten important places

Here’s a nice way to measure your neighborhood: Do you have ten interesting places?

I’ve just begun The Great Neighborhood Book: A Do-it-Yourself Guide to Placemaking by Jay Walljasper — a concise and uplifting guide to making a neighborhood not only worth living in, but worth envying.  (I have added it to my “Further reading” page.)  Like me, Walljasper envisions a neighborhood as more than a geographic region: it is a place for society, commerce, and beauty.  It is a place where people have regular business and see each other often.  It is “owned” by the locals.

In the introduction, he suggests an exercise in “zooming in” (my words).  First, consider your region: write down the ten most important places you go, places you recommend to visitors.  Then, zooming in, consider your city, and write down the ten most important places there — like a park or a neighborhood.  Then,

“Zoom in and think about one of these places and try to write down the smaller places that make up the place.  For example, if you named the main street as an important place, whate are the little places on that street where you enjoy spending time?  You can shop there, of course, but if your main street is truly a good place, you can also sit outside on a bench and talk to your neighbors, get a cup of coffee nearby, and enjoy the passing scene.” (p. 4)

Over lunch, I decided to try this with my own neighborhood.  What were the ten most interesting places within walking distance of my house?

First, a note about the above question.  I stand firmly by the assertion that a neighborhood’s boundaries are limited by walking distance: you may be able to walk farther than the edge of your neighborhood, but if a place is too far to walk it’s not in your neighborhood.  Also, “walking distance” is a fuzzy idea.  Researchers on pedestrian behavior have found that most people are happy to walk places within five minutes; farther than that and they start choosing to drive, postpone their trip, or not go at all.  Obviously, it reflects average, aggregate behavior, not the behavior of every individual.  If we adhere strictly to this, a neighborhood (as a place you walk) will be no larger than a circle one half-mile in diameter: five minutes from center to edge.  However, I’m willing to stretch this — if for no reason other than that Fairbanks is mostly not built that way, and I should cut us a little slack.

So, what were the most interesting places within walking distance of my house?  I could think of only five:

Interesting places (green, yellow) near my house (in the yellow oval). Original image courtesy of Google Maps.

• Noel Wien Library
• Seoul Gate (Korean restaurant)
• Arctic Bowl (Bowling alley)
• Chena River, especially the waterfront by Lathrop Street
• Denali Elementary School (where my kids enjoy the playground)

Maybe I could go a little farther and include Gambardella’s or McCafferty’s, maybe the fountain downtown.  My wife suggests Chartreuse, a new clothing store at First and Wickersham.  But those all feel a little out of “my turf” — I don’t feel the same sense of ownership of them and of the streets around them.

In the image at right, note that where I live — near this peculiar triangle bounded by 6th, 8th, and Bonnifield — is about as far as it’s possible to get from all those destinations yet still be roughly “between” them.  And the nearest is an eight-minute walk away (unless you count the Chena River, whose nearest point is only five minutes’ walk).

Eight minutes!  I once looked at a Census map and discovered that my neighborhood was one of the most densely populated in the Fairbanks area.  Why should anybody living in a densely populated neighborhood have to walk eight minutes to reach the nearest point of interest — especially when most people won’t leave their houses on foot for anything over five minutes away?  People need reasons to walk: the pleasure of fresh air is not enough.  If we have so few reasons to walk around our neighborhood, how are we going to meet our neighbors? and how are we to become neighborly?

So, Fairbanksans: tell me about your neighborhoods.  Can you walk to ten interesting places?  And what are they?

“Getting out the vote” and public discourse

Tomorrow (Tuesday, October 6) is a day of local elections in the Fairbanks North Star Borough.  I’ve done a little work on one campaign, enough to make me sad for the state of electoral politics.

I spent one evening and one morning recently (in separate weeks) working for a particular local candidate.  (I’ll say that he’s male, because it makes the pronouns easier.)  On the first occasion, I was “phone banking”: doing voter identifications from a list of registered voters.  We were to find out whether each voter supported The Candidate or not, and, if not, whether the person would like more information about The Candidate, or whether they supported another person.

Having done voter ID calls on an issue campaign before, the tactic seemed familiar to me: we wanted to figure out whom to call on election day with a reminder to get and vote, and whom to leave alone (with the hope that they’d forget).

On the second occasion of helping The Candidate, I did a “literature drop”: leaving leaflets about The Candidate on people’s doorknobs.  Again, I worked from a list of registered voters.

There shouldn’t be anything remarkable about targeting voters.  But what troubled me was that our lists were already targeted: at least one major party affiliation was entirely absent, and our job as phone-bankers or lit-droppers was to narrow it down further to those not hostile to The Candidate, and ideally only those likely to support him.  These people we would hit with more literature and phone calls, so that as many of “our” people would get out and vote as possible.  Thus would The Candidate win: by getting out his supporters in greater numbers.

What’s so wrong with that? you ask.  How else are candidates supposed to win?

Well, it’s not the idea that a candidate should get his or her supporters to the polls in greater numbers that bothers me.  It’s that, from a pretty early stage, we were targeting voters and focusing only on those most likely to support The Candidate.  Where, I asked The Candidate on day two, was the place for people to discuss what the important issues were and whose solutions were best?  There was nothing in what we were doing that was meant to convince people of the urgency of our issues or the suitability of The Candidate to address them better than any of the others.  “Right,” The Candidate chimed in.  “Where’s the public discourse?”

The problem, he said, was that there wasn’t much of that going on anyway, so we were stuck with “get out the vote” tactics.  The candidates get to answer a questionnaire that’s published in the News-Miner, and there are a handful of radio appearances and candidate forums where they may get a two-minute opening statement and then forty-five seconds to answer any questions.  There really is no chance for substantive debate or discussion.

So, here’s a question for everybody: in an age when political strategizing has been reduced to “getting out the vote” (of those who already support your candidate), how do we foster public discourse around elections?  Given a number of candidates about whom we may know little to nothing, how do we learn meaningfully about their views and intentions?  How do we discuss the issues in a way that leaves us open to learning and persuasion?  And whose responsibility should it be to see that this civic discourse takes place?

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Up for election are: Fairbanks North Star Borough Mayor; FNSB Assembly seats A, F, and G; Fairbanks City Council seats A and B; North Pole Mayor; North Pole City Council (two vacancies); FNSB School Board seats A, B, and G; three Borough-wide bond and ballot measures; and two city-wide ballot measures.  Read the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner’s 2009 Municipal Election overview for stories on the candidates and their answers to the News-Miner’s questionnaires, and on the ballot measures.

Taxes and the dread “social engineering”

I’ve recently had a discussion on the News-Miner site over the proper application of taxes.  My opinion seemed to raise some people’s ire, though I don’t think it’s that radical: taxes can be, should be, and in fact already are being used to direct social behavior.

Somebody wrote a letter to the editor condemning the proposal under consideration to replace the City of Fairbanks property tax with a sales tax.  (For those who don’t live here, the City of Fairbanks covers about 32 square miles, has a population of 35-40,000, and sits within the Fairbanks North Star Borough, which is larger than Rhode Island, Delaware, or Connecticut and has a population of 95-100,000.  Even counting smaller communities within the Borough, it’s clear that most people here live outside the city.  The City and the Borough have different public officials, offer different services, and assess their own, separate taxes.)

I tend to oppose sales taxes: even with exemptions for food and medicines, they inevitably hit the poor harder, since 3% of cost is much harder to bear for someone below the poverty line than for someone in (say) the upper 25% of earners.  I expect they also tend to reduce commerce, or drive it to those places with a lesser tax — in our case, to the commercial areas outside the City but within the Borough.

If the proposed sales tax is only within the city and replaces city property taxes, then won’t it encourage people to (1) buy residential property within the city and (2) locate their businesses outside the city?  (I’m no economist or expert on taxation, so please tell me if I’m off the mark.)  While I like the idea of drawing more people into the city to live, I also want them to be able to do business here.

My suggestion — that taxes should be used to encourage some activities and discourage others — raised some people’s bristles.  Yet how can it be otherwise, if it’s a correct premise that people on the whole will avoid activities that require them to pay more in taxes and will prefer activities that allow them to pay less?

Obviously, it depends on the activity — but it’s no accident that governments (from local to national) offer tax incentives that they think will encourage economic growth.  I think that it’s also the logic behind exempting non-profits from taxes: non-governmental agencies do a lot of good work, but they’re less likely to do it if they have to pay heavy taxes, and most likely if they need pay none at all.

If you’re going to have taxes at all, there is no “neutral position”. There is no “just run the government”.  There is no “leave people alone”.  Every tax has an effect on people’s economic behavior.  You don’t want taxes being used for social engineering?  Too bad; they already are.

Unfortunately, for large parts of our tax structure, it looks like the social “engineers” were working blind, or didn’t have clear instructions from the firm that hired them.  Now we have a set of largely accidental blueprints for a haphazardly built structure, much of which appears to be constructed on shaky ground.

For example: Currently, buildings are assessed at a greater rate, and count for more of our property tax, than land. (My house is assessed at $131.19 per square foot, while the land is assessed at $3.50.) This provides an incentive for people to live on large plots of undeveloped land and to keep the assessed value of their houses low. And, since assessors usually judge only by external appearances, it provides an incentive for people to keep their properties looking ugly and run-down.

Whether meaning to or not, we have chosen to promote large, undeveloped lots (and the resulting increase in driving time, since people will live farther away from each other) and an ugly, degraded human environment.

As an alternative to that structure, I would support a local tax that was based on the total number of automobile-miles traveled by any car owner living in the Borough — perhaps a product of the miles traveled and the gross vehicle weight, since automobile travel both (1) pollutes the air and (2) furthers the disintegration of community life. And I would support a property tax that was based on lot size rather than building value, since the current tax structure promotes large lots, few capital improvements, horizontal rather than vertical growth, and land speculation.

For now, though, set aside the particulars of what I think should be encouraged or enabled.  The core of my argument is:

1. Various levels of government are necessary, money is needed to run them, and that money is raised from taxes.
2. Every tax on a behavior (including the purchase of a product) discourages that behavior (not for every individual, but at the aggregate level), and the lack of a tax encourages it.
3. Therefore, the very existence of citizen-funded government results in some activities being privileged and others being de-privileged — by virtue of the tax structure alone, completely independent of the criminal code or the mandates of particular government programs.
4. Since taxes already have this effect, we may as well be deliberate about how they are applied. We should have some social principles in mind.
5. The guiding principle for taxation should be promotion (or enabling) of the common good.  (I’m fond of the Constitution’s language about more perfect Union and general Welfare — but I recognize the fallacy of appealing to authority.)  At the very least, taxes should not encourage activities that promote selfishness at the expense of the common good.

Of course, the question of what constitutes the common good is a thorny one, and there will be no absolute consensus in a community of 100,000.  But the difficulty of the discussion does not excuse us from having it, nor does the impossibility of absolute consensus excuse us from the obligation of collective, deliberate self-determination.

For want of a nail…

Corrected 20 August 2009

Readers of today’s News-Miner will already know: the FMATS Policy Committee scrapped the idea of a roundabout at the north end of Cushman St. and voted to plan for one-way traffic on the bridges south of the intersection.  I fear that their decisions have just driven a nail into the coffin of downtown revitalization efforts.

The Fairbanks Metropolitan Area Transportation System Policy Committee “voted 5-2 to abandon talk of a roundabout,” with Assemblyman Luke Hopkins and Fairbanks Mayor Terry Strle voting no, and “voted 4-3 to plan for one-way traffic on bridges to the intersection’s south.”

Current plans are to build a bridge joining Barnette St. (to the south of the Chena) with Illinois St. (to the north).  Barnette, Illinois, and Cushman, along with Doyon Pl. to the west east and Terminal St. to the east west, would intersect at a single point north of the river, between The Big I and Immaculate Conception Church.  The Illinois Street Reconstruction Project has been under discussion and in planning for decades, and it seems finally ready to move forward.  My understanding is that FMATS has recently been deciding whether to choose a roundabout or a signalized intersection.

While I have little experience driving roundabouts — they’re not very common in the United States, and I could count those in the greater Fairbanks area on one hand, even if missing three fingers — everything I’ve read about them suggests that they both increase safety and speed traffic flow.  For one example, Slate recently ran a piece called “Don’t be so square: why American drivers should learn to love the roundabout” that makes the following points:

1. Roundabouts are safer than traditional intersections because they reduce the number of possible places of collision, eliminate the left turn against oncoming traffic, slow people down rather than encourage them to “beat the light”, and reduce the severity of accidents.
2. Though vehicles appear to be moving slowly through roundabouts, average travel time through the intersection is actually reduced, because nobody has to sit through a ninety-second light cycle.
3. Stop-and-start queuing is energy-inefficient (burns more fuel), and studies have shown roundabouts to waste less energy and to cause less pollution.
4. Roundabouts are good for public space: they require less pavement than signalized intersections, increase pedestrian and traffic safety in neighborhoods, and offer the chance to actually beautify an intersection.

The article does not address roundabouts in subarctic climates, or the safety of trucks, RVs, and other large vehicles going through them.  It’s possible that winter driving conditions present some complication that makes roundabouts unworkable.  But I doubt it.

What has me more worried than FMATS’s rejection of the roundabout is their decision to plan the Cushman and Barnette bridges for one-way traffic.  Making those bridges one-way puts a major kink in the plan currently being pursued by the City of Fairbanks to turn both Cushman and Barnette two-way — and a two-way Cushman St. has been a central feature of the Vision Fairbanks downtown revitalization plan.

Some of the arguments for two-way streets in retail districts go like this:

• People are more comfortable driving fast on one-way streets, while two-way streets make them (on the whole) drive more slowly and cautiously. Pedestrians are more menaced and less welcomed by fast vehicular traffic. Creating a pedestrian-friendly environment is crucial to a central commercial/civic district.
• With two-way traffic, businesses can be seen easily by drivers in both directions — for example, a cafe will be seen by both the morning and the evening traffic, so it’s more likely to get unplanned, drive-by business.
• One-way streets require more out-of-direction travel for people to reach their destinations. (“Is that it? Damn, I passed it. Well, let’s circle the block.”) This frustrates drivers and over time makes them less willing to enter an area.

Vision Fairbanks has tremendous promise. But the decision to plan for one-way bridges may well hamstring the revitalization.  The planning consultants who drafted the original plan stressed that two-way traffic is a linchpin of making Cushman a thriving retail district.

I’m worried that the Vision Fairbanks plan is now being bled to death.  If two-way traffic is as crucial as it’s been made out to be, the new retail and civic hot spot will be a bust.  Then, of course, all the nay-sayers who distrusted city planners from the beginning will come out, crowing, “I told you so!”  And those of of little imagination will have proven themselves right.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

How “the government” spends money better than I can

Today’s challenge: Can you think of five ways that government spends money better than you could?

There is an oft-used conservative talking point — or rhetorical flourish — that we (the “taxpayers”) know how to spend our money better than “the government”.  It is a talking point that masks selfishness and reeks of anti-civicism, and it deserves to be challenged whenever it is brought up.

First, I should say that “conservative” is a woefully imprecise word.  A person can be conservative about any number and variety of things, and “liberal” (its presumed opposite) about any others.  It is an injustice to the endless variety of human thought to put each person into one of two camps.  Nonetheless, those well-known politicos who claim that “you know how to spend your money better than the government” tend to fall into the political camp that gets called conservative — so, for lack of a better and well-accepted term, I’ll use that one.  By no means am I trying to demonize those who call themselves conservative or attempting to categorically dismiss “conservative” values (whatever they may be).

The first thing I dislike about such a viewpoint is that it presumes a divide between the people (or “we the people”, as many like to say when affecting a patriotic idiom) and their government.  It presumes that “the people” and “the government” are two separate entities, with conflicting agendas.  Now, I agree that institutions often make self-preservation and self-aggrandizement their primary missions, and that they do not always serve their constituencies with perfect selflessness or efficiency.  Yet I don’t think that means we have any call to take an adversarial posture toward government.  In fact, just the contrary: an entrenched adversarial posture toward government will only incline people to pay closer attention to its shortcomings and abuses and to ignore its many advantages and triumphs.  It will incline them to disengage from the political process, rather than to put their energy toward its improvement.

My wife and I both enjoy the married life: in both the short term and the long term, we receive advantages.  Although at times we feel constrained by our mutual obligations, there are plentiful opportunities we can pursue because we have each other’s support.  When conflicts arise, we often feel the urge to withdraw from each other and avoid whatever difficult topic got us into trouble in the first place.  However, our experience (and that of countless others; I’m not pretending to be unique) has been that engaging with our difficulties helps us to become “re-enfranchised”, while disengagement only allows problems to fester and lets us continue believing the worst of each other.

Whether you believe government is “us” or believe government is “them”, you’re taking part in a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Unfortunately, since the belief is held individually but the effect on government only comes from large collective action, it’s easy to be convinced of your own powerlessness and to take the government-as-adversary stance.  Collectively, we have the power to prove ourselves right — though only in the long haul.

The second thing I dislike about the position that “you know how to spend your money better than the government” is the excess to which people take the idea of “their” money.  I am all in favor of private property and private enterprise.  But too often people are of the opinion that, because something is “theirs”, they (1) are not indebted to others for it and (2) have no responsibility toward others with regard to its use.  This is a philosophical question that I don’t have time to address adequately here.  Suffice it for now to say that those who hold the extreme form of this belief suffer deficits of gratitude and social responsibility.

The third thing I dislike about that belief is that it is just plain ignorant.  There are absolutely scads of things that “the government” (that is, the people acting collectively) can accomplish better with “my” money than I can.  Here are five:

• Mail delivery.  For all its faults, the United States Postal Service does a marvelous job of delivering letters and packages with good speed.  I cannot deliver all my mail by myself — who has the time? — and private industry would exclude many small, out-of-the-way places, or charge exorbitant fees for mail delivery to or from Fairbanks.
• Public transportation.  Helping people get from home to job to shopping to recreation and back home is a fantastic investment in economic development.  If I had to get everywhere on my own, I would spend extra hours each day between work and home, or spend extra hours’ worth of my labor to afford the private automobile to take me back and forth in a timely fashion.  Private enterprise would try to make ridership as expensive as possible, thus shutting out the young and the poor.  Of course, even a private auto is worthless without…
• Transportation infrastructure.  The buses I enjoy — or, in other cities, the trains, trams, and other means — would go a lot slower over trees, rocks, and mud, as would our private automobiles.  Do you think that private industry would do so well at laying down and regulating streets, roads, and tracks?  Do you think I could do it on my own?
• Safety regulation.  One relationship that I think is naturally more adversarial than that of citizen and government is that of employee and employer.  Businesses showed for too long (and they continue to do it!) that they would imperil employees to no end while it resulted in corporate profits, absent the regulation by and sanctions from government.
• Disease tracking.  I shudder to think what levels of disease (or other public health hazards) might ravage our communities without the information gathered and processed by the CDC.

The above have three things in common: (1) I couldn’t do them on my own.  (2) Private industry could not be relied on to do them.  (3) Were there non-profits in charge of providing the same, high-quality services, and were they reliant on voluntary donations, they would flounder.  Fall flat.  Perish.  People are too short-sighted to give voluntarily and sufficiently to all the agencies that would do them and their societies good.

Can you think of ways that “government” can spend “your” money better than you can?  Go on — just name five.  Let them be large or small.  Have fun with this!  If you approach government with an attentive mind and a grateful heart, it shouldn’t be hard.

Questions for local candidates: your input needed

This October 9, we’ll elect a new mayor of the Fairbanks North Star Borough, three members of the Borough Assembly (seats A, F, and G), and two members of the Fairbanks City Council (seats A and B) .  I’d like to make some endorsements — but I’ll need your help, first.

It may be naïvely hopeful, but I’d like to put out questionnaires to the mayoral and assembly candidates, asking their philosophies, knowledge, and goals about issues addressed in this blog.  I would publish the results and make endorsements here; I would also try to publicize these results in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.  As I say in my “About this blog” page:

The Fairbanks Pedestrian is a discussion of community-building, social capital, downtowns, neighborhood culture, city planning, domestic and civic architecture, public and private transportation, and the pleasures and difficulties of city living in Fairbanks, Alaska.

On that page, I also lay down five ideas central to this blog; you may want to refresh yourself.

Here’s an example of one possible question:

Social capital, which is written about most notably by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, is considered a source of personal and social wealth.  It is measured by the density of an individual’s and a community’s social connections, by the degree of organizational membership and social or civic participation.  Greater social capital is linked with greater health, increased public safety, improved educational outcomes, and less corrupt, more efficient local government.  (More here.)

What have you done, in a political capacity, to foster social capital?  And what will you do as [mayor / assembly member] to foster the growth of social capital in the Fairbanks North Star Borough?  Please refer to actions within the purview of the [Mayor's office / Borough Assembly].

So… What else would you like to know about your local candidates?  What would you want to ask them, with regards to civic life, city planning, urban architecture, transportation, neighborhoods, public space, and rights of the car-free?

The filing deadline is August 17th.  I would like to have list of questions ready by then.  Let hear them!

Red Couch opens; Gambardella’s closes (for breakfast)

The red couch (and chair) of Red Couch Trading Post

I write this from the latest treasure to open downtown: Red Couch Trading Post, where I write on my laptop while enjoying a blueberry cream-cheese cake, a cinnamon pull-apart (a small monkey bread), and a coffee.

Red Couch is part cafe, part bakery, part deli, and part convenience store. They have a simple deli counter, where you can have sandwiches made to order. At the same counter is their selection of pastries: not only the cinnamon pull-aparts, but cakes, pies, cobblers, and cookies. (I have tried both the peach and the blueberry cobblers, and they are excellent.) The espresso bar offers Fair Trade Certified coffee, both in prepared beverages and as bags of beans.

Most exciting, I think, is that Red Couch is a locally owned, neighborhood convenience store. Not only coffee beans are for sale, but also milk, butter (by the stick), single-serving breakfast cereals, crackers, chips, canned soups, canned milk, toothbrushes and toothpaste, toilet paper, laundry detergent, and cat and dog food. (In fact, I first stopped into Red Couch a couple of weeks ago, when I was clean out of cat food. I made the mistake of driving to a popular national chain first and getting what I needed, then visiting Red Couch because I’d read about it in the newspaper. I kicked myself afterwards for depriving myself of a nice walk and the chance to support a neighborhood business.)

Now, the two or three national chain groceries closest to downtown have a far greater selection than Red Couch — but having the greatest selection is not the point of a convenience store. The point is that it’s in your neighborhood, and going there is faster and easier than getting in your car to drive to a major grocery store. In fact, the major grocery stores near us are within walking distance of practically nobody (which, if you’re without a car, really makes them inconvenience stores). Red Couch is actually in a neighborhood, where people live. They are right behind Golden Towers public housing and within especially easy reach of the east side of downtown (Clay St., etc.).

The fact that they offer wireless internet access (in addition to lunch, coffee, and snacks) means that they are a great place for downtown business people to spend time getting work done in a bright, relaxed atmosphere. My wife, for example, often has to be in the courthouse, and she could do a good bit of e-mailing and report-writing while enjoying tea, coffee, or lunch — or while just relaxing on the cozy red couch for which the store is named.

(Today was my first time trying to connect to their wireless access point, with no success.  My computer told me that the connection was established, but nothing was ever transmitted or received.  If anybody reading this has some wireless networking expertise, could you please pay them a visit to see if there’s anything they might change to make the wireless work better?)

I think it’s always a good thing when a local business gives people reasons to get out of their houses and walk around their neighborhoods. In fact, the best neighborhoods are full of such destinations, and can be identified partly by the number of people on the street moving from one useful place to the next. Red Couch Trading Post gives downtown another such destination — a place to do something useful and to relax (and perhaps to run into neighbors). As long as they’re open, I’ll happily give them my custom.

The building is unremarkable, but the location is great -- as are the cobblers

Red Couch Trading Post is at 309 Second Avenue (where Second crosses Dunkel), in downtown Fairbanks.  They are currently open Tuesday – Friday, 6:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m., and Saturday, 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.  Their telephone number is 374-3414; their fax number (they take fax orders for sandwiches) is 374-3430.

Article from the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Thursday, May 7, 2009.

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In sadder news, Gambardella’s has now closed their breakfast service. A manager told me that they got almost no business at that hour, and it just wasn’t cost effective to keep three or more people on staff for the extra hours. That’s too bad: I thought they lent breakfast a touch of class, a chance for the morning crowd to take a step up from the readily-available diner fare. I wish Red Couch better luck.

New local slaughterhouse: Tanana Valley Meats opens

Good news, locavores: according to an article in Tuesday’s News-Miner, we now have another option to buy meat from locally raised and slaughtered animals.  Tanana Valley Meats has been certified by the USDA to slaughter cattle and hogs, and they will start butchering and retail sales immediately, in the site once operated by B-Y Farms at 9 Mile Richardson Highway.

From an ecological standpoint, this is fantastic: especially in a place like Alaska, we could stand to cut down our consumption of foods that traveled from Outside to get here — whether the thousand-mile salad or the thousand-mile steak.  To me, though, the more important thing is that it’s a local industries, where the money we pay the merchants stays here, rather than getting sent to Texas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and California (the top five cattle-holding states in 2009, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service).

Also important is that we have a closer relationship with the producers of our food.  Since we in Interior Alaska are their primary (maybe only) market, we have a much greater chance to influence the direction of their business.  For example, one of the owners boasts that “These [cattle] are not grass fed, these are grain fed.”  From what I understand (admittedly little), grain-fed cattle are fattier and less healthy, and their meat less flavorful, than grass-fed.  If enough of us put pressure on the owners to change the way their cattle are raised, we have a real chance of succeeding.  In a sense, the locals become partners in the business.  That relationship is far less likely at chain grocery stores like Safeway and Fred Meyer.

There’s only one bad thing I can say about their business: the retail outlet will (for now) continue to be at 9 Mile Richardson Highway.  Who lives withing walking distance of such a place?  While it’s good that the old B-Y Farms facility will be re-used and not go to waste — heavens, we have enough abandoned buildings already! — the location effectively shuts out the business of those too young, too old, too infirm, or too poor to drive.  While the Green Line travels between Fairbanks and North Pole, I don’t think it stops near Tanana Valley Meats.

I think a better location would be downtown Fairbanks, or even downtown North Pole, within five minutes’ walk of a bus stop.  In their current location, I may go there a half-dozen times a year. But if they were within a few minutes’ walk of a bus stop, especially in an area where I had other shopping or errands to do, I’d buy meat there every week.

Not having worked in the butchering business, I don’t know how feasible it would be, at this stage in their business. Perhaps the costs of transporting the meat are currently prohibitive.  But most grocery stores don’t get whole animals; they get primal cuts from distant slaughterhouses that are then turned into steaks, roasts, etc. — so it’s at least theoretically possible.  I hope that, in time, Tanana Valley Meats will be able to adjust their retail model to serve people in the population centers where they already live and work.

Gambardella’s does breakfast!

Summer patio at Gambardella's

Holy cats! Gambardella’s is now doing breakfast, and it’s fantastic!

It was just luck that I discovered it, too: I’d had to walk to an ATM before traveling, and my walk back took me along Second Avenue past this classic Fairbanks restaurant.  Their door was open, and they’d put out an “Open” sign.  I stopped in long enough to find out why, then brought my family back later.  (Maybe it wasn’t just luck: I’d never have noticed it if I’d had to drive.)

They have a simple enough breakfast menu: pastries, eggs, bagels, toast, omelettes, coffee, juice, et cetera.  Our portions — my wife got a breakfast burrito with eggs, cheese, and bacon, while I got a frittata with sun-dried tomatoes, onions, and broccoli — were modestly sized, not too large; at the same time, the prices were none too high, in the $3-$4 range (omlettes were $7-$8).  My experience with many breakfast restaurants is just the opposite: both portions and prices are excessive, and I wish they’d just cut both in half. We also each had a latte — only 99 cents through May 29!

Gambardella's middle dining room

Not only were the food and prices reasonable, but Gambardella’s itself is a beautiful environment in which to have breakfast. The building is colorful, a bright spot in a sometimes-dreary downtown plagued by too much gray and beige.  Their interior is comfortable and has high-enough class to make your breakfast feel like a dignified affair — though, as I said, not the prices that would keep you out.  (My only quibble with Gambardella’s is their soundproofing: it’s very noisy at dinner.  But not at breakfast.)

I’m not in the restaurant-review business, nor in the promotion/advertisement business.  But, when something comes into town that gives people something to walk to, gives people a reason to get out of their cars and experience their own neighborhood, that’s exciting.  Of course, The Diner (on Illinois) and the Co-op Diner (in the Two Street Co-op) have been serving breakfast downtown for years.  What makes this special is that it gives people of no special means a chance to enjoy a morning of beauty and elegance (with somebody else doing the dishes) right in their neighborhood.

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Gambardella’s is serving breakfast 7-11 a.m., Monday through Friday.  Stop by soon, and help keep this touch of elegance afloat!

Lewis Feldstein lecture: a master speaks on social capital

Lewis Feldstein

Tuesday night (May 12) saw an astounding lecture on social capital: Lewis Feldstein, president of the New Hampsire Charitable Foundation and co-author (with Robert Putnam) of Better Together: Restoring the American Community, spoke at Schaible Auditorium on the topic “Better Together: Community Leadership and Social Capital”.

The lecture, part of UAF’s Northern Leadership Center Lecture Series, presented little that was new to those who had read Better Together and Robert Putnam’s earlier, seminal work, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (on my “Further reading” list) — but it was fun all the same to get a re-cap of some of the exciting points of social capital research.

For those not familiar with the term, social capital is, like physical capital and human capital, a source of wealth — that is, it’s not the wealth itself but a means by which wealth is created.  It is measured by the density of social connections, whether of an individual or within a community — by the degree of organizational membership and social or civic participation.  It has myriad benefits, both to the individual and the community, some of which I’ll touch on here.

On a national level, our social capital increased steadily from the time of the Great Depression — then peaked in the early nineteen-sixties.  By almost all measures, it has been on the decline since then.

These are some of what I found Feldstein’s most interesting points:

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There is an old saw about getting jobs: “It’s not what you can do, it’s who you know.”  This is actually quite true. Feldstein referred to a national welfare-reform program of the 1990s.  It worked, for some: those who were already well connected.  If, in their generally low-paid work, they’d had the good fortune to rub elbows with a wide variety of those well off and in a position to offer work or make referrals, their luck was better in finding work later.

This is possible because of “bridging” social capital — the weak connections between prople from unlike groups.  It contrasts with “bonding” social capital — the strong connections we have with people just like us.  Both are important.  Bonding social capital is like superglue; bridging social capital is like WD-40.

You have a roughly equal chance of early death from (a) being morbidly obese, (b) smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, and (b) being absolutely alone (disconnected from others) in your life.

Norms of trust lead to cost savings and greater public safety.  For example: if you are able to trust that your co-workers will not steal your lunch from the staff refrigerator, you are spared the cost of your own private refrigerator and the trouble of continually locking up your food.  Another example: Because we generally trust our fellow citizens to pay their taxes, we ourselves don’t feel like suckers for doing the same; thus, more of us do it and the amount each of us has to pay is less.

Imagine a “bad” neighborhood in your community.  Would you like to improve public safety there?  A ten-percent increase in social capital — whereby the neighbors know each other better and know who is to be trusted — will actually do more for public safety than a ten-percent increase in expenditures for police officers, squad cars, street lighting, and other conventional “public safety” measures.  Similarly with schools: you’ll get improved educational outcomes by a ten-percent spending increase on salaries, computers, supplies, or whatever.  But you’ll get more-improved outcomes with a ten-percent increase in social capital, such as greater connections among teachers, administrators, parents, and students.

Some, hearing this, will say, “See?  That just proves that government gets in the way.  We don’t need any government spending on social programs at all!”  Not true.  For best outcomes, you need both government expenditure and social capital.  [Maybe you could say that best outcomes require many kinds of capital: not only social, but human, physical, and economic -- some of which are most efficiently provided by centralized agencies.]

Given two communities of equal income and education levels, the one with high social capital will enjoy greater happiness, greater health, increased safety, better schools, and a local government that is more efficient and less corrupt.  [Feldstein also mentioned some benefit to business.]

Every ten-minute increase in the daily time spent in a car reduces by ten percent your likelihood of doing almost any social activity.

The decline in social capital has been ascribed to number of causes, including:

• Sprawl: as people spend more time in cars, their ability to participate decreases.  [Also, while in your car, you have almost zero chance of making human connections, which require face-to-face contact and a non-hurried attitude.]
• Television viewership.  This is the one factor that correlates almost perfectly with the decline in social capital.
• Workplace model: as two-worker families have become the norm, families have less free time for social engagement.

One of the case studies in Better Together is the culture of UPS, in which relatively little is communicated by memoranda and e-mail.  UPS favors face-to-face communication and small-group meetings; in this way, they build trust.  This is a big lesson of UPS: trust is built by face-to-face contact.

Trust is built by people having the opportunities to hear each other’s stories — not their “Once upon a time” stories, but their answers to questions like, “So, where are you from?” or “What led you take this job?”

Lessons:

• Usually, social capital is not an end in itself.  It is a means to other ends, and it is built (and drawn upon) by people’s common endeavors: cleaning up a neighborhood, forming a labor union, making a road-crossing safer.
• Trust is built by starting small.
• Personal storytelling has an awesome power in generating social capital.  Feldstein and Putnam hadn’t expected this and weren’t looking for it in their initial research.

When the floor was opened to questions, I asked Feldstein: What things can government — whether local, state, or federal — do to increase social capital, or at least create an environment in which it can thrive?  His answer, which he had clearly thought about before, was:

• Have people drive less and get out of their cars more.
• Foster smaller institutions.  He specifically mentioned the benefits of smaller schools.
• Encourage service learning.  Years after their service learning experiences, young people vote more, volunteer more, and trust more than their peers without such experience.
• Feldstein also suggested (though I don’t know whether this was part of the answer to my question) that we need to figure out how to make the Internet better help people connect at a local level.

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Fairbanks is an interesting contradiction: my experience (which may not be representative) is that there is tons of civic involvement here.  The people I know all sit on boards, commissions, and committees — for government, non-profits, and churches.  They’re involved in community theater, political campaigns, and neighborhood governance.  They show up to testify at meetings of the City Council, the Borough Assembly, and the School Board.  I always tell people with pleasure of my experience on a statewide issue campaign: in Anchorage, I hear, they had a paid staffer but very little volunteer help — while in Fairbanks we had a core of about a dozen volunteers, and we had several dozen more (my list included over a hundred) writing letters and making phone calls.  That kind of thing makes me proud to live here.

At the same time, Fairbanks has a major “anti-social” element.  I don’t mean antisocial in the sense of “performing actions that hostile or harmful to society” (at least intentionally); I mean only that there are many people who stand for things in direct opposition to social capital.  They are individualistic and not “joiners”.  They deny having any responsibility for the circumstances of others or any obligation to help them.  They are mistrustful of their neighbors and their government.  They believe that the solution to many institutional problems is not greater involvement in, but detachment from and even dissolution of, those institutions.  For them, governments exist only to foster individualism, and there is no general welfare.

Of course, by saying, “They believe X“, I do a disservice to the limitless variety of human thought.  There really is no “they” who all fit the above bill in one and the same way.  But their voices form a harmony whose major notes are division, distrust, and a want of benevolence.

Where do these voices come from?  Or, more importantly, how do we can we encourage the choir of our community to sing in a more sociable key?  How can we increase citizen participation, cooperation, and trust?

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Further information on social capital:

• The Saguaro Seminar, a source for much of the research on social capital.
• BetterTogether, an initiative of the Saguaro Seminar, focusing on tools and strategies for social capital-creation.