floridavelocipede

Here in Gainesville we will likely impose a moratorium on development so we can try to work out some longstanding issues involving gentrification, affordable housing and equitable development. Ours is a university city so I’m sure we are capable of coming up with creative solutions to (so far) intractable problems.

But while we’re waiting for the city to get on with it I thought I’d offer up a little reading list so we all better understand what the issues and the obstacles are.

By the way, catch my upcoming Sunday column in the Gainesville Sun for a bit more on this always volatile issue.

First, let’s try to define the problem, shall we.

I recommend this essay in Strong Towns that basically lays out the difficulty communities experience in trying to come to grips with affordable housing and equitable development. Joe Cartwright says that when it comes to housing, cities face two different public policy goals that would seem to be mutually exclusive.

“The same municipal governments that require that housing on scarce urban land be taken up only with resource-intensive, high-building-cost single family homes; that use zoning to separate out unwanted apartments, shops, transit lines, and other uses on the grounds that they might hurt home values; and promote neighborhood beautification and other projects on the grounds that they will raise housing values, also issue affordable housing reports trying to understand why home prices aren’t lower, and levy ‘impact fees’ on new development for the alleged crime of, you know, raising home values.

“We are, in conclusion, profoundly conflicted as a nation when it comes to housing,” he continues, “we want it to be affordable, but we also want its prices to rise fast enough to be valuable as a financial investment. That’s a contradiction we need to acknowledge if our housing policy debate—and, ultimately, our housing policy—is going to be coherent and constructive.”

For a deeper dive into the housing conundrum, I recommend this Streetsblog USA piece by Dorothy Walker, who is founding president of the American Planning Association. If we want to so something about racial justice in our communities, she says, we’ve got to take a hard look at locally based zoning codes and land use regulations that have been designed explicitly to foster racial and economic inequities.

“Local control is why so much land is reserved for single-family housing — raising property values while walling off much of the city to all but the wealthy.  Local control also has thwarted the development of denser communities that enable more affordable housing, ignoring the need to serve the housing needs of both new and existing residents,” she writes.

As an example she cites her own university city, Berkeley, Ca. “Berkeley can claim credit for being a sanctuary city, for its open-mindedness and for being a birthplace of student activism. Yet for 50 years it has suppressed new housing of all kinds and now has an almost unsolvable problem of affordability and homelessness.”

She continues: “The fact is, local control over land-use decisions has obstructed efforts for racial justice and social equity in housing since the beginning of our profession. As long as the people who own land and are already housed have total control over growth and change in their communities, we will never achieve true racial justice and social equity. And, as long as local control enforces prohibitions on urban growth, we will sprawl ever-outward into green fields and agricultural lands, exacerbating climate change and land degradation.”

OK, so the obvious answer it to get rid of single family residential zoning, like they’re doing in Minneapolis, right? Not so fast. It’s just not that simple, according to Emily Hamilton’s essay in City Lab.

“What’s needed is more “missing middle” housing. The term refers to any low-rise construction that is denser than detached houses: backyard cottages, townhouses, small walk-up apartment buildings,” she writes. “Although single-unit zoning limits these useful types of housing, so do myriad other restrictions on how and where housing can be built: minimum lot size requirements, parking requirements, height limits and more.”

No, if we want to do affordable housing right, we’re going to need to do a deeper dig into our code book. She writes “if dozens of rules limit where and how new housing can be built, getting rid of one constraint doesn’t accomplish much.”

Hamilton points to the city of Houston as a success story in that regard. “It doesn’t have use-zoning, which means that housing — including apartments and other multifamily housing — is permitted anywhere private covenants don’t restrict it. In 1998, Houston policy makers reduced the minimum-required lot size for a house from 5,000 square feet down to 1,400 square feet on all of the land within the city’s I-610 loop. This made it possible to replace a single-family house with three. In 2013, the 1,400-square-foot minimum lot size requirement was expanded to cover the entire city. Thousands of townhouses have since been built that wouldn’t have been permitted before.”

Ok, got it. But, really, what’s the urgency? After all, we’ve been coasting along for years on the same old codes. To answer that question check out another City Lab piece, one with the ominous headline “COVID-19 is killing affordable housing, just as it’s needed most.”

“While housing advocates have been calling attention to the imminent danger of evictions and homelessness amid a pandemic and economic downturn, the Covid-19 crisis also stands to exacerbate the nation’s sizable affordable housing shortage, thanks to a brutal convergence of factors,” writes Patrick Sisson. “It’s clear that, as out-of-work Americans get displaced, the need for affordable housing will only go up in the short term. The long-term question is, can government action find a way to address the growing gap?”

And then there’s this Route 50 analysis “The need to keep renters housed is getting more urgent, advocates say.”

“Americans owe more than $21.5 billion in overdue rent, according to one recent analysis that underlined the urgency of the housing crisis facing American renters as the coronavirus pandemic drags on. With eviction moratoriums ending in many cities and states, experts are warning of an impending wave of families being forced out of their homes with devastating collateral consequences if immediate action is not taken to keep people housed.”

And make no mistake, when the eviction hammer finally falls it’s not going to be pretty. And the people who are going to get hurt worst are the ones who are already suffering from a shortage of affordable housing.

“By one estimate, some 40 million Americans could be evicted during the public health crisis,” reports CNBC.  “It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen,”  said John Pollock, coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel.”

That story, titled “How the eviction crisis will look across the U.S.” continues: “People of color are especially vulnerable. While almost half of White tenants say they’re highly confident they can continue to pay their rent, just 26% of African-American tenants could say the same.”

So yeah, if we’re ever going to do something about homelessness, equitable development and affordable housing in this city, now is a pretty good time to act. And for a helpful primer on the issues at hand I’d recommend this 2017 Strong Towns analysis by Spencer Gardner titled “The 5 immutable laws of affordable housing,” and “3 strategies for achieving affordable housing.”

“The high cost of housing increasingly impacts cities of all sizes, and it’s an incredibly challenging and controversial topic. Left-leaning folks might point to big developers or prejudiced, “NIMBY” residents as the causes that keep people from securing and maintaining affordable housing. Right-leaning people may blame the government for its overreaching regulations into private housing matters, or suggest that people who choose to live in expensive cities need to manage those consequences themselves.

“Spencer does not propose a one-size-fits-all solution nor does he point to one or two root causes of affordable housing challenges. Rather, he sets forth a framework of concepts to keep in mind as you think about how to improve housing affordability in your community. His ideas apply whether you live in rural Nevada, New York City, or anywhere in between.

I would pay special attention to point 3: If your zoning code mandates expensive housing, housing will be expensive.” And strategy 1: “Reduce minimum lot sizes and reduce density restrictions in single-family zones.”

And finally, from Wikipedia here is a primer on exclusionary zoning: What it is, why we have it and why it’s so hard to get rid of.

“Exclusionary zoning was introduced in the early 1900s, typically to prevent racial and ethnic minorities from moving into middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. Municipalities seek to use zoning to safeguard the health, property, and public welfare by controlling the design, location, use, or occupancy of all buildings and structures by the regulated and orderly development of land and land uses. That sometimes inadvertently limits the supply of available housing units, such as by prohibiting multi-family residential dwellings or setting minimum lot size requirements, which may deter racial and economic integration.”

More later.

Who was that masked man? That masked woman? Pretty much all of us these days. This is life in the age of COVID. Thanks to USA Today’s The Day In Pictures feature for reminding us that the way we live now is indeed different. And all the world over.

Burn Down This World

By Tina Egnoski

A book review

Celeste Leahy circa 1972 crashed a Florida Blue Key banquet with Betty Friedan, performed guerrilla theater on University Avenue with the Vietnam Veterans Against The War…and made Molotov cocktails with her friends.

Celeste circa 1998 lives in a house on the St. John’s River with her teenage son, works at dead end jobs…and positions goddess figurines at her window to ward off the wildfires that are sweeping through Florida in that meanest season.

These two iterations of the same woman, separated by 26 years, might never have reconciled one to another had not big brother Reid – nomadic poet and an almost mythical figure in family lore – suddenly reappeared in Celeste’s life to rake up long suppressed regrets and recriminations.

“Burn Down This World,” by Tina Egnoski, is an intimate examination of one woman’s unfulfilled life set against an backdrop of heat, smoke, riots and smoldering resentments.

Some of the heat still radiates from three days of rage at the University of Florida, when Celeste and other anti-war protestors clashed with police and national guardsmen. (“I had a rock in each hand when the first tear gas canister lobbed over our heads…The gas entered my throat and I couldn’t breathe.”)

Author Egnoski was not on campus during the riot years, having attended and graduated UF in the 1980s. Much of the history and background for her novel was accumulated while she worked as a UF librarian.

Longtime residents may appreciate the book for its glimpses of campus and Gainesville life circa 1972, when students combed Micanopy cow pastures for mushrooms and got high at the Halloween ball. This when they weren’t cursing Richard Nixon or occupying then-President Stephen C. O’Connell’s office. (“When O’Connell finally opened his office door, he looked haggard.”)

In her campus days, Celeste recalls “the place to drink was Rathskeller. The beer there was cheap and cold.” Then there was the time “We went to see Mudcrutch” and “instantly developed crushes on Mike Campbell and Tom Petty.”

But “Burn Down This World,” is less an anti-war morality tale than a human-scale drama about how an impetuous act of sibling betrayal derailed a young life seemingly full of possibilities – consigning an adoring younger sister to a pale imitation of the existence she had envisioned for herself.

Instead of leaving UF with a degree and opportunities, Celeste would return home beaten and bruised, having been arrested and expelled. Meanwhile her brother hit to road, eventually to gain celebrity as the “voice of his generation.”

“I didn’t want to know how my mother felt” Celeste muses upon returning in disgrace. “I couldn’t take one teaspoon of her pain onto the gallons of pain I carried.”

When her absent brother finally does reappear, it is during that long hot, terrible summer when conflagrations forced the evacuation of entire counties. Celeste’s mother is in the early stages of dementia, her son is withdrawn and resentful…and suddenly Reid is once again the center of everyone’s universe.

“I said a silent and stupid prayer to the goddesses. Were they powerful enough to bring an end to both the fires and my anger at Reid?”

Egnoski tells this story of campus riots, raging fires and one woman’s inner turmoil in sparse prose and straightforward fashion. It is a quick read and all the more satisfying for it.

(“Burn Down This World” is published by Adelaide Books and sells for $22.30 paperback and $7.99 e-book edition.)

About the author

In “Burn Down This World” protagonist Celeste arrives at the University of Florida in the fall of 1971, having “missed the candlelight march to President Stephen O’Connell’s house after the Kent State shootings” as well as “Jane Fonda at Graham Pond.”

As it happens, Tina Egnoski, author of “Burn This World Down,” missed all of that as well. She graduated from UF more than a decade later, in 1983. But while working at the UF library, Egnoski came across a photograph of “Hanoi” Jane Fonda holding her anti-war rally at UF. And she began to conceive a story line that would ultimately connect the campus riots of 1972 to the Florida wildfires of 1989.

“I didn’t live here at the time of the fires,” she recalls. “My mother did, and she ended up having to evacuate. I wanted to have these two kind of threatening stories (campus unrest and fires) happening parallel to each other…this sense of danger building.”

Like her troubled protagonist, Egnoski grew up in the Melbourne area. Like Celeste she was also a military brat, the daughter of an Air Force careerist. But there the similarities pretty much end. Egnoski grew up with sisters and had no great sibling rivalry in her life.

“When I was working in the archives I helped history professor Sam Proctor go through a lot of old photos. That was when I was first introduced to the history of the university.

“I was attracted to the ‘70s because that’s when I came of age. And when I saw the picture of Jane Fonda, I thought ‘that’s so cool,’ and the idea (for the book) began to surface in my mind.”

Egnoski lives in Rhode Island, but she briefly returned to Gainesville in 2014 to finish researching her novel. In “Burn This World Down,” she said “I was trying to tell two coming of age stories” a quarter of a century apart.

“At 18 Celeste gets thrown out of UF and sent back into a life she was trying to get away from,” Egnoski said. “She doesn’t really grow emotionally the way she would if she had stayed away. The second coming of age is years later, when she finally has to let go of her past.

“I remembered the Jane Fonda” appearance and the events that followed. “That whole conflict was so rife with history that I wanted to relate it to a personal history. I wanted to have this sibling relationship and I wanted this event that pulled them apart for 25 years.

“It was too good to pass up. Just three days changed everything” in Celeste’s life.

Remember that time the downtown library took a slice of paradise and put up a parking lot?

Richard Berry does.

Berry is a longtime Gainesville landscape architect who did the exterior designs for the new library headquarters in the early 1990s. He sketched out a park environment connecting the east side of the library and the Matheson Museum.

“This is not what we envisioned,” he now says, ruefully, of the dirt parking patch between the county library and the city-owned Sweetwater Branch Park.

For that matter, it’s hard to believe the lot is even up to code. Would the city permit a private business to store cars on eroded land along the very banks of Gainesville’s most abused creek?

On the other hand, the city isn’t exactly known for its stewardship of Sweetwater Branch either.

That park itself ought to be an environmental showcase and a people-magnet for a downtown that has otherwise been given over to asphalt and concrete. Instead, it’s been allowed to degenerate into a litter-strewn hangout for street people…a park in name only that most folks prefer to avoid.

Certainly Sweetwater Branch today is a far cry from the “botanical wonderland” that earned it front page billing in the Gainesville Sun in December, 2005:

“Gainesville’s newest downtown destination is a garden of botanical delights,” the report began. “A dozen years in the planning and four months in the planting, the garden…is a community effort to preserve and beautify a piece of ground that almost miraculously escaped development as the city sprang up around it over the last century and a half.”

As it happened, Berry was also commissioned to design the master plan for Sweetwater Branch. He envisioned the park as a “walk through time,” where significant moments in Gainesville history would be commemorated – the civil war battle waged on the creek, perhaps a likeness of namesake Edmund Gaines, a memorial to yellow fever victims, or a remembrance of civil rights victories hard won.

Heck, maybe even a nod to the Gainesville Eight defendants who beat the Nixon Administration’s conspiracy charges. In his research, Berry came across photos of the alleged co-conspirators playing frisbee near the creek during court recess. “Why not give them a plaque?”

His master plan also showcased the creek itself by cleaning up Sweetwater Branch, restoring native plants, grasses and water flow and adding boardwalks and bridges.

Unfortunately, “less than 10 percent of (the master plan) was ever built” by the city, Berry said. “It could be a city jewel.”

Berry’s plan was titled “Sweetwater Botanical Garden and Greenway.” And with the city’s announced intention to dismantle the huge GRU maintenance facility, just south of the park, and redevelop it into the “Power District,” that greenway might have eventually run all the way to Depot Park and the Gainesville-Hawthorne trail.

Unfortunately if you walk through the park today it’s hard to imagine what all the fuss was about in 2005 when the Sun hailed Gainesville’s “garden of botanical delights.” The hundreds of plants donated and the physical improvements made haven’t been taken care of. And the creek itself is so choked with invasives and debris as to be nearly invisible.

What would it take to get Gainesville to dust off Berry’s master plan and finally do right by downtown’s park? For starters, citizen champions who are willing to advocate for Sweetwater Branch and insist that the city’s long reign of neglect end.

Ron Cunningham is former editorial page editor of The Sun. Read his blog at www.floridavelocipede.com. Contact him at rondarts2008@gmail.com.

Looking back to the time before Covid, it’s amazing to think about how casually we made decisions and plans and then flew off to the far corners of the Earth.

One day in 2013 a few friends were having a few beers at Swamphead Brewery, and somehow the talk turned to places we haven’t been and always wanted to go.

And the next thing you know about a dozen of us were in Iceland for New Year’s Eve.

Quite amazing, really.

They take their snow very seriously in Iceland.

But that’s about the only thing they take seriously.

Oh, they take their statues quite seriously as well.

Grim and foreboding images indeed.

As though possessed by the very soul of unremitting winters in a land where the sun never shines for very long.

Which is not to say that there are not exceptions.

Reykjavik is a lovely provincial seaport.

A quirky mixture of Gothic and frivolity.

With some surprisingly contemporary architecture thrown in.

In Iceland the Blue Lagoon is not a movie about lost teenagers on a tropical island. Rather it is a hedonistic dip in a volcano-heated reservoir where one goes to sip wine and slather mud on one’s face.

Indeed, one can hardly walk around this land of ice and fire without having to sidestep vents of steam escaping from the ground.

Or raging torrents of water.

Or frozen blue glaciers.

It is an unstable land of grinding plates and erupting earth.

And remote, desolate landscapes.

That require monster trucks to get the tourists from here to there and back again.

They will take you to see tiny horses. Who were brought here by the Vikings….after they stole them from the Mongols.

Or tiny fishing villages where they will teach you to repair nets.

They are very proud of their Viking heritage.

They also take their fireworks seriously.

Very seriously indeed.

As seriously as their New Year’s Eve bonfires.

Quite an amazing land in the middle of nowhere North Atlantic Ocean.

This land of hospitality.

This land of ice.

And fire.

Now that we’re all more or less armchair travelers it’s fun to reflect upon the places we’ve been before things went to hell. Who knows, maybe we’ll get there again one day.

Oh what a great cycling city. And a surprisingly vital metropolis for a town whose motto is “It’s not cold all the time.”

Speaking of cold. Reykjavik in December is both cold and dark. But it’s an amazingly artsy town to wander around in. ‘Course you’ve got to mind your footing because the sidewalks can be quite slippery.

True story. I once sat across the table from my son in a Castro District restaurant and casually remarked “This is a great city, I believe I could live here.” He went pale. Maybe the first time I ever shocked the kid. He’d come all the way across the country to get away from home.

The Andy Warhol museum, the Steelers and fire hose art that looks like a skyscraper. What’s not to like?

One day a week a stretch of Thames riverfront becomes a massive used book buyers paradise. Plus 007.

It’s not just the giant spider, although that’s pretty cool. A world class arts museum and a canal system that turns into a giant ice skating highway in the winter.

Flights are regularly canceled due to low lying fog. But once you get here and the sun comes out it’s quite lovely. And quirky; hence the drooping light poles.

As Bob Dylan said “I’m going back to New York City I do believe I’ve had enough.” This after being lost in Juarez in the rain and it’s Easter time too.

The Dalmatians are haunting. The architecture ranges from Ancient Greek to Napoleonic French (depending on which empire was occupying which island at the time). And the blue haired lady standing sentry over a medieval village alleyway was just the icing on the cake.

In Greek theater, the mask was the thing. The actors wore them to convey tragedy and comedy alike.

Ironically, when The Hippodrome (from the Greek “horse” and “race”) finally reopens, it is likely to be the folks in the audience who are masked.

But nobody knows when the show will be able to go on again at The Hipp. Meanwhile, Gainesville’s only professional theater is struggling to keep, um, body and staff reasonably intact.

“It’s a tough time,” says Hipp creative director Stephanie Lynge. “Our summer show (traditionally a big money maker) is gone, it just wasn’t safe. We can’t do live theater, but we are rehearsing, remotely, for a play that we will record and put on line for sale” later this month.

In the meantime, here’s something fans can do to help keep at least a few Hipp employees drawing a paycheck.

Buy a Hipp Mask.

And more specifically a Depot Park mask, a Mudcrutch mask or a Night Sky Over Paynes Prairie mask.

Or go really go crazy and score a Potato At Turlington mask (don’t ask), or a Dr. Cade’s Studebakers mask.

All of the above, and more, thanks to a creative collaboration between The Hippodrome and former Mayor Pegeen Hanrahan.

Who, since the onset of COVID-19, has become sort of the Tzarina of Hogtown Maskdom.

Since early March, Hanrahan’s nonprofit group, GNVcovidmasks.org, has assembled hundreds of volunteers to sew and distribute thousands of masks throughout the community.

While that work continues, she has a new site, HippMasks.org, to market and sell a line of Gainesville-centric masks.

Proceeds from the sale of those masks go to support three theater wardrobe department workers who, having no costumes to sew at present, have instead been turning out hundreds of Hipp Masks.

“They produce between 150 and 175 masks a week,” Hanrahan says of the Hipp sewists. “I just choose the fabrics and the patterns.”

Not to mention the quirky that’s-so-Gainesville names.

“Our entire wardrobe team has been sewing for over three months,” says Lynge. “They help design the masks and Pegeen pays them. They are good quality masks with filters. It’s kind of a win-win for everybody.”

In recent weeks Hanrahan has been on Facebook soliciting name suggestions for this new line of Hipp Masks. There’s a Gainesville High School mask and a Harn museum mask, a Kanapaha Gardens mask and a Santa Fe Zoo mask.

And here’s the thing. If we’ve learned anything from the events of the past few months, it should be that masks are not going to go out of style any time soon. We will almost certainly be donning nose-to-mouth covers in public places for the foreseeable future, if not longer.

Hipp Masks have been for sale at Satchel’s Pizza. Now they can be bought on line.

“If someone told me a year ago that I’d be marketing face masks using Gainesville themed fabrics I’d have said they’ve lost their minds,” says Hanrahan. “But it’s actually been a lot of fun. And as long as they are willing to keep making them I’m going to keep selling them.”

Listen, in the classic Greek theater tradition, there will almost certainly be lots of masks on display when the Hipp finally does get to open its doors.

One way to help turn a pandemic tragedy into a farcical comedy is to show up for curtain call sporting a Chert House Gainesville mask. Or maybe a Spanish Moss At San Felasco mask.

Ron Cunningham is former editorial page editor of The Sun. Read his blog at floridavelocipede.com