Check Your Priors: Tragedy of the Commons

There’s a great deal of hype right now about the newest drug to treat depression: esketamine. Psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex isn’t convinced. Regular ketamine, at $10 a dose, seems to work great. But a pharmaceutical company can’t make money on that, so nobody’s paid the big bucks to run it through official clinical trials, so it’s never even been approved for depression. What do? Develop an isometric ketamine derivative you can patent and sell for $590-$885 a dose, of course!

Also it doesn’t seem to actually, you know, work. Not like the cheaper, off-patent, original. But hey, at least it’s profitable and comes in a convenient nasal spray!

Check Your Priors
Hey, remember the concept of the tragedy of the commons? Turns out it’s all a lie. BoingBoing pointed me to the Twitter thread about it, but it seemed so appalling that I had to check to make sure it wasn’t an exaggeration. So, here’s a couple paragraphs from the classic influential 1968 paper from Science:

Freedom To Breed Is Intolerable
The tragedy of the commons is involved in population problems in another way. In a world governed solely by the principle of “dog eat dog”— if indeed there ever was such a world — how many children a family had would not be a matter of public concern. Parents who bred too exuberantly would leave fewer descendants, not more, because they would be unable to care adequately for their children. David Lack and others have found that such a negative feedback demonstrably controls the fecundity of birds (11). But men are not birds, and have not acted like them for millenniums, at least.

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own “punishment” to the germ line — then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state (12), and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts overbreeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement (13)? To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.

Yes, that’s his argument that food aid and a welfare state are bad because they inhibit the natural order of those people starving to death when they breed too much.

And also, for crying out loud, the plural of millennium is millennia.

Papers, Please
A man is badly injured on the job, but employer’s worker’s compensation insurance has lapsed. Rather than comply with its obligations, the firm tries to have the injured man deported.

Mainstream Conservatives
Steve King (R-IA) gets an awful lot of support from the white nationalist hate group Identity Evropa.

New Hampshire has quite a large state legislature, so you can always find a handful of out-there examples, like the founder of the popular misogynist messageboard /r/TheRedPill. But this one is pretty impressive, because several Granite State Republican legislators decided that wearing pearl necklaces (as in “you’re clutching your pearls”) was a great way to mock people testifying in favor of a gun safety bill.

Misc
NPR: White suburbanites cause an awful lot of the air pollution in minority urban neighborhoods.
MassLive: Robot bartenders are coming for our jobs.
Paris Review: The tragic tale of the Phantom Gambler… and how it’s been co-opted to advertise casinos.
BoingBoing: Pentagon’s new robot tank “adheres to all legal and ethical standards” for automated death robots.
Twitter: This is a rather callous series of jokes about the “Fake Melania” conspiracy theory but also I laughed, so… I guess, to me, the real Melania is the friends we ate along the way.

Cultivating Joy
Timelapse of cat napping all day. Watch to the end.
Baby albatross! 
Vincent D’Onofrio does not like monkeys.
These puppies trying to howl.

A few words about the economy

A brilliant little essay came across my feeds last week, from a fashion/not-fashion blog called Man Repeller. It’s about this temptation to “rise & grind,” to monetize every hobby and make it a side-hustle:

We live in the era of the hustle. Of following our dreams until the end, and then pushing ourselves more. And every time we feel beholden to capitalize on the rare places where our skills and our joy intersect, we underline the idea that financial gain is the ultimate pursuit. If we’re good at it, we should sell it. If we’re good at it and we love it, we should definitely sell it.

As it turns out, turning a passion into a career is not always a path to happiness. It can be a path to an unbalanced life.

I hadn’t thought about it much, to be honest, but it resonates with me. When I was writing a lot of poetry, I didn’t try to get it published. When I started this newsletter, I didn’t even consider signing up for Patreon and asking people to contribute. I already have several jobs. I don’t need another. Yet.

Polarization
I have a recurring disagreement with one of my subscribers (hi Dad!) about whether it’s important to respect  conservatives and engage seriously with their ideas, since they’re our fellow countrymen and we owe it to them, even if we disagree.

But major conservative donor and influencer Jerry Falwell Jr. came up on stage at a major convention recently and threatened to shoot Rep. Ocasio-Cortez as a cattle rustler. He’s also known for wishing more people carried guns to shoot Muslims. So, maybe let’s not?

I’m not the only one saying this. Brad DeLong, a self-described “Rubin Democrat” and well-known moderate Democrat, says the Democratic Socialists should drive the bus now, since being a moderate requires a good-faith negotiator on the right side of the aisle, and his team of moderates were clearly wrong when they thought they could find a middle path through compromise:

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

Longreads, Shortreads
Forthcoming from Princeton University Press: Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?

Don’t trust low unemployment numbers as proof that the labor market is doing fine—it isn’t. Not Working is about those who can’t find full-time work at a decent wage—the underemployed—and how their plight is contributing to widespread despair, a worsening drug epidemic, and the unchecked rise of right-wing populism.

Now from The Onion: Pros & Cons of Congestion Pricing. (Market urbanism is hilarious don’t @ me).

WTF, Possibly NSFW
CES, the global consumer electronics expo, issued an award to a woman-led company for its groundbreaking work on female sexual health. Then they rescinded the award, claimed the product was obscene, and banned the company from even attending the expo. Par for the course in the consumer electronics space.

(Yes, I’m aware that I am linking to an article about the downsides of entrepreneur-obsessed hustle culture and to an article from a newsletter about entrepreneurship called The Hustle. I contain multitudes).

See also: Fake doctor sex expert.

Papers, Please
Mentally ill veteran born in the US was carrying his passport when arrested but still spent 3 days in ICE custody.

Cultivating Joy
This bird is very odd looking. (Twitter)
These blokes arguing about a pet emu (click for sound) (Twitter)
Puffin with a rainbow full of tiny fish in its beak. (Nat Geo)
These cats sitting on glass tables are just the best. (Insta)
A dog thrilled to go on a walk after leaving a shelter. (Twitter)

Ineffective surveillance, Apartment Construction Trends, Pangolins, Prince

The best thing I read this month was titled Forget privacy, you’re terrible at targeting anyway.

This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There’s no magic here.
…
Anyone can, in a few seconds, think of some stuff they really want to buy which The Algorithm has failed to offer them, all while Outbrain makes zillions of dollars sending links about car insurance to non-car-owning Manhattanites. It might as well be a 1990s late-night TV infomercial, where all they knew for sure about my demographic profile is that I was still awake.

You tracked me everywhere I go, logging it forever, begging for someone to steal your database, desperately fearing that some new EU privacy regulation might destroy your business… for this?

Housing policy rant
All these new apartment buildings look the same! Why the hell is that? Part of it, it turns out, is that a combination of flame-retardant lumber and sprinkler systems make wood-frame midrise construction allowable in many building codes, and the financing works out in areas with moderate-to-high demand, and that’s why we have this particular shape of 3-5 story building with parking and/or retail on the ground floor.

Before you begin calling the 5-over-1 or 3-over-1 buildings “monstrosities,” note that they’re not. Here’s a Twitter threat touring some of the most beautiful ones around the world.

Or take it from the English, who have been dealing with 3-4 story buildings for quite some time:

Meanwhile, exlusionary zoning requiring only single-family homes is just segregation by another name.

Anyway, legalize apartments.

Data visualization

Jackson Pollock dataviz.
W.E.B. Dubois’ beautiful hand drawn charts about African-Americans, presented at the 1900 Paris Expo.

Zoom Zoom
A record number of Americans are more than 90 days behind on car payments.

“Predatory lending practices and a lack of real transportation options leave many households trapped in debt with few ways out,” said Faye Park, president of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which advocates for consumer protections.

Meanwhile, CityLab asks us: As the planet warms, who gets to drive? Why do so many jobs require us to own cars?

Social Media Curation
Reminder: Batman is actually bad.
Sing along with “My Neck, My Back, We Tried This In Iraq…”

Cultivating Joy
Rough neighborhood: This crow has an ankle monitor and a knife.
Which is better? The tiny dog winning the agility championship? Or the slightly-larger dog just sort of chillaxing along the agility course?
Cat ladders!
This dude who just really enjoys growing prize-winning giant vegetables.
Pangolins. Just…. pangolins.
There is now an official archive of Prince gifs.

This Field is Required

It’s not at all original to note that gender-based product marketing is weird as hell. A friend who has a toddler recently posted a picture on social media of two packs of children’s underpants, pointing out that even for toddlers there’s a pink tax, with the girl’s parents expected to pay a substantial surcharge for a
seven-pack of day-of-the-week underpants. That goes on for years. Razors. Deodorant. Whatever.

Over-gender-determined product marketing is also really weirdly condescending to men, with hundreds of products designed to reassure Mister Man about his massculinity. It’s almost hard to parody, although Twitter usually rises to the challenge:
And this follows us everywhere. You get sort of blind to it, the way you
stop noticing the way something smells, until you pay attention, and
then it’s overwhelming.

I had to edit a page at work this week about about Botox For Men. It’s
exactly like regular Botox, but there’s a Sports Illustrated in the
waiting room and it says it’s For Men. Every nonsurgical cosmetic
procedures clinic in America needs a special page on its website about
Botox For Men because too many men won’t do a thing they suspect is
feminine. We’d probably all be better off if everyone quit worrying
about eye-wrinkles, but it’s revealing and kind of sad that some men are
afraid to do anything about theirs without a sign that says CAMO PRINT,
NONSURGICAL COSMETIC PROCEDURES, & TRUCK NUTS IN AISLE THREE.

We have a long way to go, brothers and sisters.

Billionaire Boys Club
Peter Thiel funds a science magazine called Inference. It includes a ton of junk science in with some decent stuff. Apparently that’s deliberate.

The Future
“Riverbed,” a short story from a new collection called A People’s Future of The United States.

What the Future of Work Means for America’s Cities.

Won’t repeat, might rhyme: a history of how the car industry invented the crime of jaywalking and stole the streets from pedestrian.

Twitter Curation
The Duck Dynasty guy is back and opposed to health care because we’ll all live forever in Jesus.

Cultivating … Something
Hey remember the neon-colored joy of Lisa Frank? It’s back, in 21st century nihilist despair form! (There’s also merch!)

The spider-tailed viper has a tail that looks like a spider. Which it
uses to attract things that eat spiders. So it can eat them. It is terrifying.

Cultivating Joy
This spider is cute though.
This dog encountering a glass floor very cautiously.
A very cute bun with very cute mini-buns inside it.
These amazing photos of Jupiter from this past summer.

I’m a Real Boy!

This week I finally rejoined the full-time workforce, albeit on a 6-month temp contract. I did not miss the phenomenon of rush hour but everything else has been very nice. I get up each day and see the same bus driver on the 88 bus, and there’s work to be done and I’m helping organize a giant pile of information and learning all kinds of weird and novel stuff.

Still, there are unpleasant reminders everywhere of my inferior contingent status, beginning with an ID badge branded NON-EMPLOYEE, and continuing with a note that since Monday is a federal holiday, I am welcome to take the day off, but I won’t get paid. I now have a company email address as though I were an employee, which means that when HR sends out an all-hands note reminding employees that they have access to discounted event tickets and assorted fringe benefits, I get it. But when I click on the offer, I’m blocked from the section of the intranet that describes those benefits. Sorry, when I invited everyone to the party, I meant only the real people. Not you.

Our Current Political … Whatever
Quick roundup: Cardi B has the best political commentary on the shutdown (seriously, listen to what she has to say, especially if you’re too old to know, or think you don’t care, who Cardi B is) followed closely by the actual Yahoo! News! Headline! “TSA Workers, No Longer Giving A Fuck, Play Uncensored Rap Music In Airports.”

And just as a reminder of what the Republican party is, notorious holocaust denier Chuck Johnson was spotted in close company with two Republican representatives. He had apparently been visiting with them to talk about genetics. You know. Like you do.

And of course, plus ça change.

About the investigation of Individual 1, I have only this to say:

In the UK, the Daily Show has a Great British Bake Off/Brexit Crumble joke that is almost too on the nose.

Cultivating Joy
I don’t have anything cute today, but on the plus side, scientists have genetically engineered spicy tomatoes. Add in some lime and cilantro genes and you have something that becomes salsa when you put it in a blender.

Plus, these very good photos are really neat.

JACKCHOP!

The Unasked Question

I read a lot of college application essays these days. And one of the most common pieces of advice I give to students is to look at the essay prompt from the perspective of the admissions committee, and remember that they have a second question, one they’re not asking. They ask “Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?” but what they mean is “What does your story show us about why you should be on our campus? How does it reveal you to be a student we want around?”

Unasked questions are everywhere if you look for them. Buzzfeed hosted a chat with a bunch of advice columnists and they said that, especially in relationships, there’s often an unasked question. In these cases, the asker doesn’t even know they’re asking the wrong question. They ask “how do I get my partner to…” and they mean “how do I get what I need without inconveniencing or offending anyone?” and the answer is “You will have to speak up and inconvenience or offend someone.” And sometimes, if not usually, it’s far worse. As Nicole Cliffe, of Care & Feeding, says: “The asked question is “How can I tell my stepdad not to talk about Alex Jones in front of my children?” and the question I need to actually answer is “Is it possible for me to bar my door to a man who physically and emotionally abused me for six years, even if it makes my mother sad?”

Please send me further unasked questions you encounter.

This truly is a bizarre timeline
This week’s “are you kidding me” headline comes to you from Newsweek: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fake Nude Photos Debunked By Foot Fetishist. Yep. Someone Photoshopped AOC’s face onto a photo of Sydney Leathers, best known for sexting with formerly respected person Anthony Weiner. And of course someone recognized her toes. Like you do.

Thoughtful reads
The psychology and architecture of science fiction, submarines, cities, towers, and alienation: “…as if those structures’ bewildered new residents are encountering not a thoughtfully designed building but the spatial effects of an algorithm, a code stuck auto-suggesting new floors, supermarkets, and parking lots when any sane designer would long ago have put down the drafting pen.”

The Burnout Generation: I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset.

The Skills Gap was a Lie: In other words, the skills gap was the consequence of high unemployment rather than its cause. With workers plentiful, employers got choosier. Rather than investing in training workers, they demanded lots of experience and educational credentials.

An article I wrote for the MIT Energy Initiative house magazine has been adopted and promoted by the main MIT News Office, which is kind of cool.

Cultivating joy
Horse plays with giant soccer ball.
Dachshunds … well, just check the Twitter caption.
This feat of bricklaying/domino-toppling must be watched all the way through and with sound on.

I Got 99 Stories and They’re All… Good News?

I just finished my economics 101 class, and coincidentally finally found an article that actually explains macroeconomics without oversimplifying. It asks a big question:

During the 20th century, the West suffered from two major economic crises. Each of these brought about a major revolution in economic thinking. After the 2008 financial crisis, no such shift has taken place. Economists are still using many of the same tools built to address the same questions as before. When is the revolution?

See also: What minimum-wage foes got wrong about Seattle. In my microeconomics unit, the minimum wage was the canonical example of the effect of a price floor: If there’s a minimum wage, it will reduce the total number of hours worked in the economy. But the point at which it actually has an impact is much, much higher than you’d expect. If the minimum wage were $100/hour, the job market would almost certainly get weird. But $15? Turns out it’s fine.

Climate update
An internal Amtrak analysis predicts that by 2050, rising seas could make portions of the Northeast Corridor lines impassible. The Northeast Corridor is the sole profitable segment of Amtrak’s operation. The report was kept private and revealed only through a public records request.

Meanwhile, in Miami, higher ground is starting to get more expensive… meaning poor people have nowhere to go.

Hot takes
Jack Shafer, writing for Politico, argues that racism is bad, but anti-racism is worse.

I sing of plums and of a man
William Carlos Williams plums-in-the-icebox jokes are where Twitter truly shines.

More year in review
Passionweiss best rap songs of 2018.
Eater’s most scathing reviews of restaurants.
Designboom’s top futuristic visualizations of 2018.
99 good news stories you may have missed this year.

Cultivating… the uncanny?
I don’t … just… this GIF.

Cultivating joy
Brushing kitty.
Lumpsuckers, or lumpfish, are  used as a sustainable source of caviar. They are called lumpsuckers because they look like weird little lumps and they cling to stuff. But if you you persuade them to cling to a balloon, they turn into adorable googly-eyed little lumps.
Dog trapped under blanket.
Oregon says a fond farewell to Eddie the Otter, known for basketball and masturbation.
Capybaras in a hot yuzu bath.
Tiny kitten and St. Bernard.
This epic photo of the sky at night.
Greyhounds in sweaters looking like the bad guys in an 80s movie.
Stephen Colbert’s Anxiety Baking Show is hilarious.

Hello, Shill

Not a week goes by that I don’t get called a paid shill for some shadowy conspiracy of gentrification-mongers. But I was amused to get doxxed on a neighborhood discussion list this week. I made the mistake of joining a conversation about housing policy in the next town over, and someone looked me up, found out that I live in Somerville and work in marketing, and accused me of being a paid spokesman for the real estate lobby, posting my home address and LinkedIn profile to the list. Joke’s on him, though, I’m unemployed and now everyone in Arlington knows I’m available for new marketing projects.

God, if I could get paid to be a shill.

Business strategy rabbithole
Vox explores the shrinking razor market:

It’s a classic example of capitalism working not quite the way that was promised but the way it does when put into practice by humans. We see it time and again — with the hotel industry, with cable TV, now with razors: Shrinking markets are not allowed to simply shrink, but instead inspire aggressive pandering, bizarre advertising, and nichification of products that have no reason to be so differentiated.

Related: Why does Marriott have 30 different hotel brands?

Related: The Baffler explores the explosion of mattress companies:

[M]arketing data suggests you stand at the confluence of two powerful trends: high anxiety and lowered expectations. And that is the magic inflection point, apparently, for treating yourself to a CasperTM Essential…. Don’t think of this as a recession; think of it as the market correcting your standard of living.

Elsewhere
Bloomberg’s Pessimist’s Guide to 2019.

The Intercept on the absurdity of an Anti-BDS law in Texas, which led a speech pathologist to lose her job because she refused to take a pro-Israel oath.

Paul Ryan is pushing for extra visas for white people while refugees are teargassed at the border. Class act, that one.

Pushback Against Monopoly
Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft: Daniel Oberhaus author quit all five for a month. Apple is pretty easy, as is Facebook, even including subsidiaries Whatsapp and Instagram.

Amazon’s a little harder: It’s not just that it’s cheaper and more convenient to shop there, but that’s a big thing. And dropping Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods means it’s harder to find decent cheese. And then of course you can’t use its other subsidiaries like Twitch, IMDB, or Goodreads. And if you’re really trying to cut back, you should also drop two enormous Amazon Web Services customers, Netflix and Spotify.

Getting rid of Microsoft means switching to Linux, of course, but also giving up Github and all the other Microsoft web services.

And getting rid of Google is far harder than switching to Firefox from Chrome, or using the almost-as-good but more private DuckDuckGo search engine. It means going back six generations of Samsung phones to install a homebrew not-Android OS and app store on a jailbroken Galaxy S3. It means switching your email address and email provider. It means switching from Google Docs and Hangouts and Calendar, which can be especially hard if you use those for work. And of course you’re giving up YouTube, which means giving up the instructional videos you need to figure out your new phone and operating system. And of course Google Maps and Waze are right out, so you have a hard time getting places and don’t know how long it will take to arrive.

Twitter Curation

This thread, about a high school police officer who assumed a brown kid had stolen a missing calculator:

And this thread, about… corn:

Cultivating joy
Man plays piano while a cat vies for attention.
I did not expect these toads to be very cute. The sound is a little unnerving though.
Dogs dining in a busy restaurant.
Very sleepy kitty.
Terrible maps, including “Super Bowl Wins By Country” and “Roman Air Bases in Europe.”
Stack your cats neatly.
SMBC Comic: What’s the Most American Movie?

Year in Review in Review

One of my favorite parts of the end of the year is the “best-of-the-year” and “year in review” articles. It’s just a fun way of looking back at the year, taking stock, and wondering what the hell is wrong with other people.

Of news summaries I most like the image-heavy ones like the CNN Year in Photos or the AP Year in Photos.   There are the really short ones, like the Dictionary.com Word of the Year (“toxic“), or the all-Japan Kanji of the Year (“disaster“).

And of course there are the top-ten or top-hundred lists, the recommendations like the Times best books, or Globe best cookbooks/children’s books and Slate’s Best Audiobooks, and so on. That’s sort of expected.

But have you seen the list of the year’s best book covers, selected by book design professionals?

Where there’s a list or a review or a recap, there’s bound to be a controversy, and Spotify has stepped in it with one of theirs. They give you a personalized list of what you listened to most this year in the form of “wrapped,” but the anger is directed at their all male list of the most popular streaming artists, which of course was influenced heavily by their recommended playlists all year long. (For balance, check out NPR’s top recommended artists, all female).

I love the niche recaps, like Strong Towns reposting its ten best zoning and housing articles, including “Most Public Engagement is Worthless” and “Why Developers Are Only Building Luxury Housing.”

And I love giant data-driven retrospectives. The Google Year in Search is the king of them all (in the food category, people were looking for recipes for low-carb cheesecake and CBD gummies), but the social media notes from Twitter (K-pop music factory BTS is the hottest band in the world, duh) and Instagram (major trend: ASMR and other calming videos) are fascinating.

And when you get to the end of the internet, there’s Pornhub.

Pornhub’s review is at pornhub.com and is obviously not safe for work, but it’s also very (ahem) revealing. They have a rather impressive set of infographics covering all sorts of notable details: They moved over 4,000 petabytes of filth, more data than the entire internet transmitted in just 2002. The top searched categories didn’t change much, but most-trending searches included “Fortnite” and “Bowsette,” so … that’s… I’m sorry I know that now, but once I learned it, I had to subject you to that horrible knowledge as well. Anyway, there’s a ton of kind of neat global and regional data there, illustrating the pantsfeelings of the world.

Virtue signaling
Right-wingers love to accuse “SJWs” (social justice warriors) of “virtue signaling.” By this they mean saying things, or doing things, primarily to show off how virtuous you are, especially when those statements or actions don’t actually accomplish anything or solve anything.

So what do you call it when the president says we should deport refugees from the Vietnam war?

Longreads
This article, titled “Life in the Psych Ward,” is haunting. I do not recommend reading it in public, and I do not recommend reading it when you will be alone for a long period of time afterwards, but I recommend reading it.

Twitter Curation

You’re only allowed to call it a Monster Energy Drink if it comes from the Monster Energy region of France

Jamesgle Bells (@cashbonez) December 11, 2018

Doomsaying
“Goodbye, Miami. Goodbye, Boston.” The Thwaites Glacier is melting faster every day.

Cultivating Joy
The rusty spotted cat is the world’s smallest wild cat. Here’s a YouTube video featuring the world’s most adorable apex predator.

Letter to the Somerville Board of Aldermen re: 11 Fiske Ave

To the Board of Aldermen:
The Somerville Board of Aldermen must balance the big picture needs of our city, our region, and our planet on the one hand, and the minutiae of individual neighborhoods on the other. At the biggest macro level, we have a climate crisis that we should respond to by encouraging transit-oriented, rather than car-oriented, living patterns. We have a regional housing crisis demanding more housing, especially near transit nodes. And we have a city that needs taxpaying residents and workers to continue to fund its ongoing operations.
Last night, at a community meeting about a small project, I saw a small group of neighbors standing up to oppose all of those things. “You people,” said one of them, pointing at the only person of color in the room, a man representing a business based in Somerville, “come into our city, and build things that look like projects, and ruin what we have.” The “we” in this statement was about twelve white property owners over the age of sixty. “This neighborhood has never changed,” she continued. “It has always been like this. And I don’t like the changes that are happening in my city.”
“Not in my yard,” said another, demanding that detailed professional snow removal plans be written into the building’s condominium documents, and asking for a third-party specialist to determine whether shadows would cause structural damage to his walls.
The participants imagined that workers would vandalize their homes in retaliation for parking tickets; they imagined that pickup trucks would be too large to fit down their narrow street; they imagined that the residents of their street who were minorities agreed with them even though they were not present and hadn’t been asked; they imagined that a slight change in lighting would cause mold which would destroy their siding. They could not imagine a neighbor who did not own a car.
When I spoke up to note that transit oriented development is better for the world and for our community, I was told “go back to Prospect Hill.” Living as I do just a five minute bike ride away, I was deemed an outsider with no stake in the matter, trying to apply out-of-touch abstract principles to support greedy developers.
I go to a lot of these community meetings. At most of them, I see older, whiter, wealthier residents opposing all kinds of changes for all kinds of reasons. But this meeting was the most explicitly racist one I’ve been to. I am ashamed that I did not push back harder against the racism and xenophobia I witnessed last night.
I hope that the board will acknowledge that the concerns of the dozen or so opponents of the project are based entirely on irrational fear of change, and that they will allow a totally normal, entirely reasonable project to move forward.
Sincerely,
Aaron Weber