House Status: Step 1

We’ve moved some things into the house on Summit but we don’t want to put too much there yet – anything moved in will have to be moved around as we renovate, and it’ll get filthy.

But this morning I met with the architect for detailed measurements, and the contractor for a phase 1 estimate. He’s going to get us samples of the material he recommends for the roof, and a permit, and an estimate for the exterior work, and contact his plumbing guy about getting the gas line turned back on. In the mean time I can use an electric heater to keep the pipes from freezing.

To the Summit!

I haven’t written this up yet because I didn’t want to jinx it, but Megan and I just bought a new house, in Union Square, Somerville. It’s a great location and it’s structurally sound, but it needs a lot of work.

What we know of the history reflects the development of Somerville as a whole. It was constructed some time around 1900, probably earlier, but we aren’t sure yet. It may have been at one time a home for unwed mothers, or a boarding house, or just one of those Prospect Hill duplexes.

By 1970 it was a dilapidated 4-family, and some people who met during a consciousness-raising workshop in the summer of ’69 bought it to turn into a collective living space. They added on to the back and converted it into a single-family home for about 12-14 hippies, all of whom kept day jobs – they turned on and tuned in, but didn’t drop out. In May 1971 they were profiled in the Boston Sunday Globe.

The commune turned it into a single-family home with one kitchen and two bathrooms, each with triple sinks. Membership changed over the years, and we’re a little vague for a couple decades. Eventually the building was owned by a couple who ran it as a collective rooming house. That arrangement ended when the couple broke up. One person stayed and one left, prompting a condo conversion in the 1990s.

The sold condo was purchased by James Welborn, who left a tech job at Akamai to open Hub Comics, just down the hill. He died in 2011 after what appears to have been a struggle with mental illness.

The condo was unoccupied from then until the time that we bought it. The commune’s mouldering triple-sink single bathroom is still there, along with a depressing kitchen, bannisters that appear to have been gnawed by dogs, and a fridge with magnets holding both a child’s artwork and a divorce-related court order.

Thanks to the work of Banco Santander and Century 21 Real Estate of Fall River, it was more than 3 months from the time we signed the Purchase and Sale agreement to the time we were able to close. That means we’ve got a tight timeline to get the building weatherproofed before winter sets in.

The list of tasks that must be completed in the next 30-ish days includes but is not limited to:

  • Replace roof and fix holes in siding
  • Replace back door
  • Replace front door locks
  • Reconnect gas service
  • Replace furnace
  • Restore rotted window sills
  • Clean & sanitize basement, install dehumidifier
  • Sage-smoke building to remove any and all ghosts

Once that’s done, we can begin the renovation proper.

Metaphors Matter

Metaphors matter. They make abstract ideas comprehensible. They frame conversations – the way a picture frame sets the borders and shape of the picture it contains. They’re hugely useful, but you have to realize that they’re not perfect, and understand their limits.

Politically one of the most commonly misused metaphors is a household budget. Balancing a government budget ought to be the same, right? But it isn’t. A government has greater control over its income and a much larger time horizon than a household and that affects decisions in very serious ways. A household can spend more than it makes over the course of a day or a week and then even it out at the end of the month with no problem. A corporation usually aims to do that over the course of quarters or years. A government can do that over the scale of decades or longer. That’s a huge difference and it matters to policy and to human lives. If I refused to buy groceries today because I don’t get paid til next week, I’d go hungry for no reason. If the government refused to feed the poor this year because tax receipts are down, lots of people would go hungry for no reason. But for some reason people claim that balancing a government budget is just like balancing a household budget. You can see the similarities, but a metaphor is not a perfect mirror.

Similarly, governments don’t compete like businesses, and “we need to make our country competitive” is a hugely misleading statement. If I develop a hotel/casino (ahem) and someone else does the same thing across town, then their gain is my loss. In that situation, it makes sense to try and steal customers away from the other casino, keep their staff out, and so on.

Better to compare governments to your neighborhood. When Mr. Jones next door gets a raise at work, I’m not angry. I try not to be jealous either. I want him to succeed! We’re in this neighborhood, this world, together, but too many of the “run government like a business” types think that others must fail for us to succeed. That’s simply untrue, and a business-mindset metaphor makes it easy to believe it without even thinking about it.

Who are these shadowy Millenials?

A marketing-focused post on LinkedIn says that “Whole Foods has made headlines this week for its announcement to introduce a new chain of stores to attract the mysterious millennial generation.”

Mysterious?

The article itself points out that this shadowy group is the single largest living age cohort in America. But do you truly know who they are? Has anyone over the age of 35 penetrated their mysteries?

Do we Old People even know what Millenials look like? Are they secretly reptilian aliens? How could we possibly tell? Would you know if you’d even met one of these mysterious figures?

Rumor has it that David Brooks and Paul Krugman have been having quite a long series of disagreements with each other, but NYT editorial policy and Serious Grownup Writer etiquette prohibit them from naming names.

So instead we get the curious phenomenon of New York Magazine offering a gloss of Krugman’s rebuttal to Brook’s case that Freddie Gray died of moral failure, when it would be far simpler to just write that David Brooks is a festering toolbag. Which of course, NY Mag is hardly the first to point out.

I can’t bring myself to read Brook’s column here, to be honest. There are so many things I would rather do. Like read the comments section on a Boston Herald article about diversity in local police forces. Seriously, you’d probably learn more there.

Nothing against blowflies

I get that the free-rider problem is a real problem in all societies. We can’t support an infinite number of free riders, I know. And I acknowledge companies that offer benefits to spouses and dependents have the right to limit those benefits to just the spouses and dependents they originally specified. And I get that nature abhors a vacuum and that an organism will adapt to fit any niche available.

But if you are a smart and enterprising human being, and you see a system that’s broken and full of perverse incentives, what’s the correct and moral response? Do you work to fix the system? Or do you insert yourself into the system and try to capture some of those perverse incentives for yourself?

A fly must lay its eggs, and an egg needs a place to hatch into a maggot, and if that’s the torn flesh of a host organism, well, that’s how nature works.

But most humans have choices about how they want to survive. And if you make the choice to be the parasite because it’s faster and more profitable than cleaning the wound, than maybe you need to take another look at your soul.

Then again, we’re all parasites in one way or another. Free riders morally or economically or both. Nobody pulls all the weight all the time.