Whitcomb: Warm Up the Warming Issue; In Search of Supplies; Home Hell and Comfort
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Warm Up the Warming Issue; In Search of Supplies; Home Hell and Comfort
….“But slashed and ribboned, glimpsed through fronds,
the river hauls its cargo of argent light
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTand she advances, past basswood and crabapple clumps
along the tarmac where cyclists, joggers, rollerbladers
entranced in their varying orbits swoop
around her progress….’’
-- From “Island in the Charles,’’ by Rosanna Warren (born 1953), Boston area poet
“Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.’’
-- Horace Smith (1779-1849), English poet and novelist
…”{I}n August in Mississippi there's a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there's a foretaste of fall, it's cool, there's a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times.’’
-- William Faulkner (1897-1962) American novelist and short-story writer
"August slipped away into a moment in time, 'cause it was never mine."
— Taylor Swift (born 1989), American singer and songwriter and part-time resident of Watch Hill, R.I.
I’ve been saddened about how little has been said about global warming in the crowded (12 candidates!) race for the Democratic nomination for Rhode Island’s First Congressional District. I wish more candidates would talk about this existential threat, beyond saying they’re against it!
The winner of the primary, on Sept. 5, will almost certainly win in the general election, now that a demagogue’s cult has poisoned the national Republican Party with a kind of kleptocratic fascism, complete with threats of violence against real or perceived opponents.
I’ve been closely following Walter Berbrick, a soft-spoken former U.S. Naval War College professor, national-security expert and retired naval officer and now a moderate Democratic candidate. He’s an expert on global warming, including its national-security and economic challenges. The Ocean State, of course, must deal with the challenges of rising seas associated with climate change.
There are some other highly experienced, honest and interesting candidates with good character -- Don Carlson and Gabe Amo come first to my mind -- but Walter Berbrick’s knowledge, policies (on housing, etc.) and personality have impressed me the most so far. Anyway, there are so many candidates that all bets are off on who might win, and a week is an eternity in politics.
How many of those who will complain about what the winner of the seat does in office will spend a little time to research all the candidates and VOTE? Sadly, not many, I fear.
There’s an inevitable battle underway in Providence’s colorful Fox Point neighborhood over a plan to put up a five-story, 62-unit apartment building at the intersection of Wickenden (the neighborhood’s main commercial drag) and Brook streets. (We lived in that neighborhood many moons ago.) So far, it looks as if city officials will approve the building, or at least a scaled-down version.
Of course, neighbors almost never want any big structure put up near them. That’s one reason that housing costs are so high: The more you limit housing construction in an area, the more you drive up its housing costs. It’s the lack of supply, caused by what are in some places grossly outdated zoning ordinances and well-organized nimbyism, that’s at the heart of the problem.
Those economic pressures are particularly intense in attractive and culturally rich places, like Providence’s East Side/Fox Point neighborhoods, with famous institutions, most notably Brown University. While residents complain about the density produced by all those students and staff, and Brown’s tax-exemption, the fact is that the presence of a university, especially a prestigious one like Brown, is a major reason for its area’s allure and a source of much revenue for its small businesses.
As for the complaints that the proposed building would add to the neighborhood’s parking problems, I suggest that a surprisingly large percentage of people in the building could do without owning cars. They could walk, bike, Uber and/or use RIPTA buses. And they can rent cars when they need them. Or pay $100 a year for an overnight-parking permit. Too much of American cities have been taken over by parking, and the East Side/Fox Point is wonderfully walkable.
Hit this link for a terrific GoLocal article on urban parking:
Maybe the biggest worry should be that the developer, Dustin Dezube, has been the subject of tenants’ complaints about alleged poor maintenance and unfair evictions at his properties; some have even called him a slumlord. Could city officials eventually reject his project because of his dubious record?
(Brown had an undergraduate admission rate of 5.5 percent in the last cycle, and many, probably most, of those rejected could do the work if admitted. I’m sometimes surprised that many elite schools, such as Brown, don’t expand their student bodies, but they hype their ultra-selectivity. If Brown were to admit more students, it would probably require new dorms to be built in the Jewelry District, much of which Brown already controls. Neighbors around the university’s main campus would howl if more student housing went up, replacing yet more old (if mostly undistinguished) houses.
Some cities, such as New Rochelle, N.Y., have succeeded in partly addressing the housing-affordability crisis by seriously adding housing.
According to the report linked below:
“In 2022, there were 2.9 new housing units authorized per 1,000 existing homes in the Providence metro area—a total of 2,122 new units. Among all large metros, the Providence metro area is building the fewest homes relative to the number of existing homes.’’ Of course, this is a long-settled and densely populated area….
https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-most-in-new-housing
Hit these links, too:
https://smartgrowthamerica.org/new-zoning-makes-new-rochelles-vision-a-reality/
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Part of the problem is simply the American adoration of wealth. A lot of doctors want, above all, to get rich, especially after all the education expense and very long work of becoming a physician. (Of course, most of us want to be rich!) You can see it when you get a $200 bill for talking with a physician for 15 minutes. You probably have some insurance, but all of society ends up paying much of these bills, including in taxes.
Our crazy, fragmented, almost chaotic medical-insurance system encourages grotesque overbilling and out-and-out fraud. Associated with that is amazing inefficiency, which also drives up costs.
We came across a New Yorker magazine cartoon in the Aug. 14 issue whose caption read:
“Please fill out these medical forms, which are identical to the ones you filled out earlier online, and have the exact same questions your doctor will ask you later in the exam room.’’ Readymade for administrative bloat.
I’m sure that this sounds familiar.
Maybe our medical costs – highest in the world -- and inefficiencies wouldn’t be so maddening if America’s ranked higher in medical outcomes, but it lags other developed nations. Hit these links:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/health/us-health-care-spending-global-perspective/index.html
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Nimbyism is expensive. Consider that the cost of a 145-mile power line to bring hydroelectricity from Canada to Massachusetts via Maine has risen by about 50 percent, to $1.5 billion. That’s in no small part due to the delay in finishing the project caused by the voters approving a 2021 Maine ballot measure (the campaign for which was partly financed by fossil-fuel companies) aimed at blocking the project, on which work had long since begun. But then a Maine state jury decided that the measure was unfair and so it unblocked the line. Massachusetts ratepayers will have to pay at least some of the added cost caused by the delay.
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Climbing up a modest mountain on the Vermont side of the Connecticut River with a couple of friends, we came across a sign (I wish I had brought my iPhone to take a picture of it) in the woods that indicated that the surface of the huge late Ice Age Lake Hitchcock reached about 700 feet up the mountain around 12,000 years ago, which is a mere blink in geological time.
A lesson in humility indeed.
Eventually, the lake drained, though the river it created, by far New England’s biggest, of course, goes on and is responsible for the region’s most fertile farmland.
Mountaintop Mansions
There seems to have been something of a fad among rich New Englanders in the first decades of the last century to build mansions, mostly as summer places, on the top of mountains, despite the obvious inconveniences. There’s Beech Hill Farm, in Dublin, N.H. (once used as a fancy drying-out spa); Castle in the Clouds, now a museum, on Lee Mountain, Moultonborough, N.H., and the Weeks Estate, which includes a mansion museum, on the top of Prospect Mountain, in Weeks State Park, in Lancaster, N.H. I visited the park the other week with a friend connected by marriage to the Weeks family.
The house, built by Lancaster native John Wingate Weeks (1860-1926), an investment-business mogul and important Massachusetts and national political and government figure, has a treasure trove of historical information. The main house, finished in stucco, somewhat eccentrically combines the Tudor and Spanish Mediterranean Revival styles. The interior is quirky too, with a huge top room with a pool table in the middle surmounting what had been remarkably small bedrooms below. And of course there are antlers on the wall.
The views from the estate and on the road up are spectacular.
Just nosing around New England can provide lots of pleasant surprises.
A Masterpiece of Digressions
Bill Bryson’s 2010 book At Home: A Short History of Private Life is really a collection of asides (and asides to asides) about the West’s long slog toward modernity, with Mr. Bryson’s well-known wry and often dark humor. It includes narratives about the horrors of epidemics not so long ago, sometimes murderous medical treatments, brutal working conditions, including for young children, and extreme bigotry, including against the poor. Along the way we learn some fascinating facts about the evolution of science, architecture and politics; actually, much of it you may already know if you have some interest in history, but the author dresses it up nicely. He’s a highly successful entertainer.
Mr. Bryson, a British-American, often seems interested in everything, but he’s mostly focused on material from England, where he now lives, and America. Sometimes you might feel he’s just too all over the place. He does, to be fair, use the history and design of the Victorian era Anglican rectory in Norfolk, England, where he was living when he wrote the book, to give it a little unifying skeleton.
Churchill reportedly once quipped: “Take away this pudding, it has no theme!”
In fact, At Home is classic Bryson, and so might be best read almost randomly, in blocks, from time to time, a half hour here and there.
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Reading the book reminds us of how worse things were not so long ago. For instance, I learned that my maternal grandmother had lost all her siblings (all of whom were younger than her) by 1925.
One sister died in the 1880’s as a child in a fire, a terribly frequent disaster in a time when candles were still widely used, and billowing clothes worn; in her case it was a candle in a Halloween pumpkin. Another sister died, I think of appendicitis (a common killer not so long ago); my grandmother’s mother was killed in a car crash on a very rough country road – a crash that badly injured my grandmother’s brother. For a couple of years during World War I he was a partner in a Canadian munitions factory, before he was murdered “by a Mexican’’ while working as railroad foreman after what seems to have been a long slide in status and/or health. Was he self-medicating with booze for the pain from the car-crash injury?
No wonder my grandmother was anxious up to when she died, at 96.
She hated the sound of a phone ringing: It could be bringing very bad news. (I’m a little leery of phone calls myself. Bring back telegrams!)
But I suspect that the sort of tragedies she experienced were quite common back then.
Things are much better now for most people than, say, a century ago. But my sense is that the quality of life has declined in the last couple of decades for most Americans – in part because of technology.
Caption: My Great Aunt Mabel, who died in a fire while her family lived in Providence. Then they moved to booming Minnesota (wheat and iron ore).
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“Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’’
--What Manhattan Project scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer famously said he was thinking while watching the explosion of the first nuclear bomb, on July 16, 1945
The epic and haunting movie Oppenheimer, about the Manhattan Project, which brought us nuclear weapons, seemed to me a masterpiece, (though its two brief sex scenes seem gratuitous). And it raises painful ethical and geopolitical issues that continue to reverberate. The special effects are shocking, and the film’s portrayal of Washington backroom politics superb.