Category: Public Parks,Trails & Environment

A view and a ride

I’ve never met anyone who has regretted a visit to Banff National Park. Just an hour and a jig west of Calgary, Alberta making it easily accessible via an international airport. Regular bus service transports worldwide visitors up to the spectacular peaks. The mountain range is stunning. Summer, fall, winter, or spring, nature will impress you by washing the skies in pale blue and then fluffing out a smattering of white clouds through the valleys.

We generally come in the winter to ski at Lake Louise. Two hills in the areas, Sunshine and Mt Norquay combine their ticket sales under Ski The Big Three. But we stick to Louis. Even in years such as this one where the snow is scarcer than they would like and the tips of boulders are peaking through some of the moguls. How can anyone pass up that view?

A nice Brit took this picture of us today. He threatened to walk away with my phone and laughed at his ruse (and clearly gave me back my phone). On some of the runs, you can see Chateau Lake Louise and the lake beyond. Both it and the Banff Springs Hotel were built by the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the 1920s to encourage tourism into the park. In recent years the park attracts about 4 million visitors a year. Many stay in the town of Banff which is about forty mintues east of Lake Louis.

For us, one key component is the ease of transport. It’s easy to get up to Banff with all the ski/board equipment. The airporter drops riders off all along Banff Ave and up on Tunnel Mountain. Likewise, comfortable coaches pick up from strategic spots amongst the lodging choices to get skiers up to their hill.

If you need a connector shuttle, the city of Banff has several routes running through the town of 8000. This one is waiting out a six-minute pause before his next circle starts. He’s pulled up into a large camping area that is packed with people and their RV’s and campers in the summer months.

Whether you need a ride up to the park from the airport or around the ski hills or through the quaint and historic town of Banff, they have you covered in the most convenient ways.

Which public? What purpose?

The New York Times ran an article the other day about access to public lands: It’s Public Land. But the Public Can’t Reach It. Hunters out west in Wyoming are using an app called OnX to locate public lands. The controversy arises when access to the prime hunting acreages is blocked as the parcel is surrounded by private ranches.

This leads to the question of whether something is public if it is beyond their reach. But first, what does it mean to be public land. According to the NYT:

Especially around the fact that public land — by definition owned by all Americans — is not always publicly accessible.

Is it realistic that every park and open space is considered a public amenity to every person on US soil? It doesn’t seem like nearly a precise enough description of what is truly at work.

There are 30 million acres of public land in Montana

The sheer geographic distance can keep a US citizen from enjoying Half Dome in Yosemite or the Reflecting Pool on the Mall in DC, but there are other impediments to obtaining full use of a federal, state or city property. If a gang of pill pushers are dealing at the base of some statue or drunks are sprawled out across every park bench, then the function of the park is transformed. And a more general public is discouraged from entering.

Neighbors can also use local authorities and rules to keep people out as the private ranchers do in the NYT story. The hunters are threatened with a civil lawsuit for having stair-stepped their way onto Elk Mountain. There will be pressure for the use of the land and thus difficult to deter the public from venturing out. As the rancher finds out:

However, he couldn’t keep the public out, for interspersed within his property lay 27 parcels — 11,000 acres in total, an area the size of several airports — owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management and the State of Wyoming.

Round the Wicket?

I was right down to the minute as I sailed into city chambers for our park’s commission meeting. Thinking it was going to be a sleepy November meeting, I was surprised to glide past a crowd seated on the standard upholstered blue chairs in the audience. Our city tends to over-deliver on parks and trails, so there is little controversy to draw a crowd to the assembly.

Present in the audience were activists in action. The representative for the group told us there’s a need for a cricket pitch in our city. And the arguments which followed were all worthy. A growing group of Asian residents was interested in a sport from their home country. It was their passion. Neighboring cities had put the necessary fields, so as a matter of pride it would be nice to play on some home turf. There were fields for baseball, soccer, and football, there’s no good reason to exclude cricket.

Cricket in Minnesota? It had never occured to me before. Our state does indeed have a Minnesota Cricket Association with, according to our presenter, several hunderd members. And as reported here, private individuals have gone to great length and expense to build up the infrastructure for the sport.

It is so easy to forget how many different activities and interests are present in a community, among people who live nearby. Here is an organized and engaged group who have claims to the public field– as do the Little Leaguers and Youth Football Associations. Wouldn’t it be nice though to have a little more information on all these different sets of people? What kind of numbers are we talking about for the people who devote their time, energy, and resources toward soccer, pickleball, or cricket? How many labor hours churn through to support the activities?

It just seems like, for analysis purposes, it would be handy to have a handle on the set of people who desire the use of a good for a certain function.

use, function, design, and lower crime

When I was out walking the pup today, I was thinking about things in terms of use, function, and design. Take for instance a park bench. You can sit on it, stand on it, or lie down across it. But its function, when used as a seat on a beautiful fall afternoon, is to enjoy the oranges and reds of the fall foliage. It may also function as a platform if there was a concert in the park and one wanted to see it over people’s heads. Lastly, it may function as a place to take a rest, especially for the homeless.

Now think about a catalytic converter. Its use is to reduce airborne pollutants produced by gas fueled vehicles, that could be harmful to people and the environment. In 1975 its function was a decisive step toward a cleaner environement as it enabled compliance with the EPA’s new mandates. Today, as the tweet below indicates, its function is currency for youth who have learned how to remove and trade them.

When the public surrounding a park decided to discourage the homeless from sleeping on park benches, they tackled the issue with design. And came up with this.

Isn’t it the function which determines an objects value? A bottled beverage at the check out at a grocery store may run you $2.25 even though right down the aisle you could grab a six pak for $4.59. The function of the first one is a refreshment.

The function of the stolen catalytic converters is a fungible commodity. I think Rev Christopher is asking for an economic design that would break up the market so that his youth would no longer have incentives to carjack and steal. Who’s up for the challenge?

Forests

A fall that follows a long hot summer produces the most spectacular blaze orange and crimson colors amongst the tree canopies. There’s no escaping its beauty. Old elms arch over city streets littering the sidewalks with reds, yellows, and amber. Scallop-edged crowns of maples, oaks, and birches bunch up along the freeways. It’s a time of year when you don’t have to go looking for nature, as it has already found you.

My grandmother used to love taking walks in the woods. Perhaps it is because she grew up on the wide open prairie, plowed under into farmland. The woods held all sorts of delights, mystery, and adventure. She’d have us kicking through the leaves looking for mushrooms. In the spring the trillium was the first to bloom and later, under very special circumstances, we may find a Jack-in-the-Pauper. Follow a trail after a chipmunk and you may look up to see a doe, frozen in its tracks, hoping you’ll not notice it amongst a stand of popular.

I think my grandmother would have enjoyed this poem by Mary Oliver.

How I Go Into the Woods

by Mary Oliver

Ordinarily I go to the woods alone,
with not a single friend,
for they are all smilers and talkers
and therefore unsuitable.
I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree.
I have my ways of praying,
as you no doubt have yours.
Besides, when I am alone
I can become invisible.
I can sit on the top of a dune
as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned.
I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.
If you have ever gone to the woods with me,
I must love you very much.

How to heat a house

The measure used when transacting in wood is called a cord- or 128 cubic feet.

Up north (as we call any rural community vaguely north of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro) it is common for homeowners to heat their homes with wood. There are stoves built to burn the split logs slowly and maximize efficiency. Sometimes the black cast iron fireboxes are in the lower level of the dwelling, or sometimes out in the yard with a venting system drawing the hot air into the home.

No matter what or where, there’s a lot of work involved. Fallen wood in a forest may be there for the taking but the labor involved in sawing the timber into eighteen-inch lengths and splitting it into manageable widths is persistent labor. Then there is the hauling and stacking. It will make a Lumber Jack (or Jill) out of you.

The backup system in most homes is baseboard electric. Often people use some combination of the two, loading up the fire before bed and then counting on the baseboards to kick in toward dawn. The remote nature of rural living makes it difficult for utility companies to run natural gas lines along all the roadside ditches. Natural gas is the most prevalent form of fuel for homes in the metro. It is also the most economical, whereas electric heat is the most expensive. Propane is a less common option and has its own set of drawbacks.

It would be wonderful if battery technology was advanced enough to capture and store energy off solar panels. The energy would flow right through the existing baseboard network. But in a part of the world where the temps can run below freezing for several weeks at a time, it simply isn’t possible to rely on solar energy. As populations grow, gas lines are appearing in populated areas. Splitting wood is a young man’s game and when given the option, most consumers are ready to convert to gas.

Meet Roxanne

Roxanne and her helper replace the work of five able bodied men. You go girl.

I’ve been one to poo poo the whole AI is going to conquer the world of workers thing. When they come up with a way for robots to do all my housework, I’ll be a beleiver. Until then, AI is just an upgraded piece of machinery.

But then I met Roxanne. She a deminuitive type, but does she pack a punch. Come ball season she can paint the lines on the fields in perfect geometric patterns, all with the aid of GPS and the guy holding the tablet. They say if you compare satellite pictures from manually painted fields to AI painted the differences are striking.

She’s a bit pricy. And she’s high maintenance. But the parks department is so bummed when she is out of commission they’ve stored up the parts for the most common repairs. Not only does she do the work of five men, she’s a lot of fun.

Sculpture, Minnesota Style

Paul T. Granlund (October 6, 1925, Minneapolis, Minnesota – September 15, 2003, Mankato, Minnesota) was an American sculptor. His creative career spanned more than 50 years and more than 650 different works. Most of his work is figurative and made from bronze. His patrons included colleges, hospitals, Lutheran churches, and other institutions.[1]

Granlund received his Bachelor of Arts from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota in 1952 and his Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1954. Awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study sculpture in Italy the same year, he later returned on Guggenheim Foundation fellowships in 1957–1959. During the 1960s and ’70s, he was a faculty member at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.[3] He also chaired the sculpture department for 14 years. [4]

Granlund was the sculptor in residence at his alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College, from 1971 until his retirement in 1996, and maintained a studio at the institution until his death. Over 30 works are on campus, including the friezes and doors of Christ Chapel.[5]

wikipedia

Norms of today; Norms of yesteryear

Minneapolis is lucky to have a long-standing history of parks and trail system support. Early in its history, the city set up a connected park system throughout its neighborhoods. The green space ropes together a string of lakes which often have a walking path encircling their parameter. But despite being glorified for prescient action in the development of a great city- city leaders of yesteryear have failed the environmentalists of today.

Now wild rice is something to be preserved! Enshrined! Even though it is cultivated for commercial sale around the state, and grown wild under a protected status near and on Indian reservations. It’s a little hard to believe that even with this new status, the city consumer of parks and trails would be better off with a slothy body of water in lieu of what Lake Nokomis is today.

I’m not sure how far the revisionists would like to go with their return to nature. Perhaps there will be a push to revert all yards to prairie grasses. Or dig up all the asphalt roads and return them to cart trails. Nor am I sure how this shaming of the present and glorification of the past is helpful.

Cultivate creativity, take a walk

I like to walk. I’ve posted here about how Rousseau loved to walk, and here I suggest how to plan a walk; sometimes a walk is simply about the beauty of it, as seen here.

But this article by Steven Johnson will give you much more to chew on: The Thinking Path.

A few years after Charles Darwin moved into Down House, the three-story home in the suburbs of London where he lived with his family for the last forty years of his life, he leased an adjoining strip of land from a neighbor and constructed a gravel path that ran alongside its periphery. Over the years he planted gardens and trees to accompany the oak grove already on the property, which he came to call “Sandwalk Grove.” Almost every day, he walked multiple loops on the path, working through the grand theory of evolution that he developed over the decades at Down House. Today, visitors to the property can retrace Darwin’s steps on what is formally called “the sandwalk,” though Darwin himself gave it another name. He called it his “thinking path.”

Scenes from today’s walk at French Regional Park.

Embedded is not the right word

I think it was Karl Polanyi who coined the term embedded. In The Great Transformation, the philosopher mulls over the notion that not all worthwhile interactions are adequately represented in a transparent market setting. he drew people’s attention to the influences of family relations, obligations to a tribe, and so on. He did not deny that the allocation of resources through a market process was beneficial. He claimed that all activity is embedded in the social circumstance of the actors and in that way influenced the outcome no matter how remotely

The definition of embedded is:

  1. (of an object) fixed firmly and deeply in a surrounding mass; implanted: “a gold ring with nine embedded stones”

It’s like society and its institutions form a big glob of clay and the market trading apparatus is a shiny gold nugget glittering against the thick, slow, clay substance. The muddy substance can shift and nudge the glittery mass but embeddedness promotes the idea that each substance is separate. You’re either a part of the bling or the mud. Each exists in a realm that cannot be interconnect. Society can influence, rock, tug and tip but not breach the market.

Fast forward four score or so and people are talking differently about interactions between private market transactions and duties to the public. There are many personal stories in the newly released book Speed & Scale by John Doerr. They provide specific examples. Tensie Whelan is a journalist who was covering sustainable development issues when she made a discovery.

One big flashpoint at the time was McDonald’s practice of sourcing beef from Costa Rica. It kept U.S. hamburger prices down, but the added grazing also led to deforestation. Environmental boycotts led McDonald’s and others to stop sourcing beef from there, but that did not stop the deforestation. People turned to slash-and-burn agriculture to put food on the table. That got me interested in how we could help people pursue sustainable
livelihoods. The Rainforest Alliance was founded by Daniel Katz. He was moved
to act after reading that fifty acres of rainforests are destroyed every minute, and two dozen species become extinct each day.

Tensie Whelan- Speed & Scale

The environmentalist had successfully dissuaded McDonald’s from importing beef from Costa Rica, which, it is implied led to higher prices of US Beef. The expense of the attempt at stopping deforestation was realized in the market. Yet deforestation still occurred because the owners of the forest still needed to eat and thus put the land to that use. As a group, their action, rightly or not, created a negative externality to the world as they internalized the benefit of a harvest. Tensie Whelan’s firsthand accounting of the tradeoffs helped her understand the situation as she pursued other strategies of collaboration with the local people.

The 1990s saw considerable progress on deforestation, but it wasn’t fast enough for Tensie. It was a long, hard slog to go through the developing world farm by farm to collaborate with local growers and Indigenous peoples. Tense promised money for people to protect the rainforests instead of destroying them. She won farmers’ trust, and sign-ups rose each year. By mandating safe working conditions and fair pay, the program also caught on among farmworkers.

This time instead of forcing a corporate player to pull out of a market, the strategy was to buy out the benefit of farming the deforested areas. In effect, the rain forest is being maintained as a world club good through a buyout. The locals are made whole by internalizing the cash.

The next story comes from Laurene Powell Jobs. In this case the movement between the nugget of gold and the clay is between Silicon Valley’s semiconductor market and the health and environment of a neighboring town. The glitter of tech commerce doesn’t sit nicely atop an institutional environment, it penetrates the lives of East Palo citizens and throws cost on them in the form of their health expenses.

Thirty years ago, when I was getting my MBA at Stanford Business School, I found out that just a few miles away the city of East Palo Alto was a disposal center for Silicon Valley. A lot of semiconductor debris was dumped there, along with biomedical waste. The
city was paid for this disposal, but it was not done properly. This happens across low-income areas all over the world. There were all sorts of toxicity in the water table, with high levels of arsenic and radon. It gets transmitted into the food that’s grown there, it’s in the gardens, it’s in the drinking water. Since we fund local education through property taxes, the schools in East Palo Alto were far inferior to the ones in West Palo Alto. They don’t have a robust tax base. They couldn’t afford good roads and sewage systems. They didn’t have a grocery store. They didn’t have a bank. They didn’t have the kind of infrastructure that would yield a healthy community. In 2004, I started the Emerson Collective on the belief that all the issues we work on, all the systems that touch our lives on the planet, are interlocking.

Laurene Powell Jobs- Speed & Scale

Embedding implies a lot of nudging and cradling and massaging. But the spheres of economic activity between the private sector and public groups (or clubs) is very porous. As Whelan points out, the impulse for action is not taken away when the large corporate entity withdraws. The action is running on its own group incentives. When pollution is externalized onto a neighborhood the medical expenses can be accounted for. When companies improve standards to reduce or eliminate the pollution, they internalize the cost to cease the externality. The price of their product now includes the reduction of pollution to the nearby community.

These are dynamic interactions between two spheres of economic activity. They can be identified, accounted for and evaluated. There’s nothing embedded here.

Claims about Trees

To be sure, I’m a big supporter of trees. Still- I wonder about these claims:

According to research conducted by MPRB, each city taxpayer saves around $100 a year from trees being on public property. Trees process about 200 million gallons of water each year, saving up to $6 million in stormwater management costs.

https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-lifestyle/minneapolis-wants-to-use-1m-in-federal-cash-to-plant-200000-more-trees

The population of Minneapolis is around 420,000. Of course, some of these are children who rely on their parents to pay taxes. Let’s say persons under 18 are around 20% of the city’s population, that leaves 336,000 taxpayers. At $100 savings per taxpayer, that comes to 33.6 million– not 6 million. Or if you go the other way and divide the 6 million by 336,000 taxpayers, the savings are $18 per person.

No link to the research to see the numbers.

Why do people prefer the suburbs?

Like dueling twin cities, there is an ongoing feud between those who love the city versus those who prefer a suburb. Here are a few reasons why people move out to the burbs. I present these in no particular order other than how they come to mind.

  1. Many buyers desire privacy. They want their own space and don’t really want to feel obliged to interact with their neighbors. It’s not to say that they don’t greet the resident across the street with a cheery hello- it’s just that they want to be able to retreat behind their four walls if they so desire. There is a little more elbow room on a .25-.31 of an acre lot which is standard in the burbs, than on a city lot which runs about half the size.
  2. Less drama. That’s how an acquaintance explained it long ago. When you pull back your front shades and see a guy sleeping in his car in a pile of refuge, you wonder if you should go investigate. It’s not that he is causing you any harm, but you feel like you should go check on him. This happens far less out in the burbs.
  3. Many suburbs offer reliable transit access to a central city around business hours. It is a myth that dwellers in the urban core do not require a vehicle whereas suburbanites do. I make this claim through observation, but I’d love to see statistics that prove me wrong.
  4. The core cities indeed have many more restaurants. But the burbs have a greater selection of grocery and big box type of shopping all with easy access. Any store that needs space, Ikea, car dealers, REI, and Best Buy, will find space in less dense areas.
  5. In Minnesota both the burbs and the city value parks and trails. But there are more lots in the outer areas which have views onto nature areas, marsh lands, and waterways. Since people find happiness in nature, this also edges the suburban options up a nudge from the city.

There’s a lot to love in all areas of a metro area. Luckily everyone likes a slightly different combination. It is a bit silly to poke fun at one area over the other when it’s clear that there are plusses and minuses to all options.

To plan a walk

If you want to get the most out of walking, a little forethought can go a long way. I used to walk my dog in a loop around my house for two thirds of a mile and call it good enough. Life was busy and this fifteen-minute daily routine seemed adequate. Now my husband teases me when I pity the couples I see striding curbside, and he asks if I want him to pull over to give them advice. I have yet to take him up on his offer, but I will post some notes here.

Tip number one: with a little effort you can find some great spots to walk within a very short drive of your home. Take a look on google maps and use the various overlay settings to find trails. Anything that is highlighted in green is usually a park or nature setting. Often there are paths along waterways from simple streams to the likes of the Mississippi River. A little sleuthing will guide you to a much nicer environments than the pavement outside your front door.

When you first take up walking it’s a hard to get a sense of distances and just how long of a walk you want to tackle. Perhaps you start with a twenty-minute commitment, which is about a mile. If there are no obvious loops, you can always walk along a scenic path in one direction and simply turn back to where you’ve parked your car. Before you know it one mile won’t seem like enough and you’ll be able to extend the length of your walk. We like three miles as we can get it done in a little less than an hour and come away feeling like we got some exercise.

It is quite useful if you have a watch which tracks your distance. I recommend keeping track of all your jaunts in the beginning, before you have a set routine. It’s easy to forget or making excuses to cut it short. Measuring is a great way to keep on track and feel good about what you have accomplished. There are a variety of apps that do this as well. I think Run Keeper offers options for running or walking, for instance.

Discovering new trails is one of the best parts. You have to open to a disappointment when trying something new, in case it doesn’t pan out, but more often than not you discover a delightful new path through mature oaks or sugar maples. It was always in your back yard, and you didn’t even know it.

Memories

My grandmother delighted in the woods. From a young age she led my brothers and I in through the underbrush, searching. Nature was a treasure chest waiting to be discovered and she was Indiana Jones leading the adventurers into the cavern full of gold.

These were not well-groomed urban parks with asphalt trails meandering through a grove of trees, edged by grass, keeping walkers out of the mud. She took us into a dense cropping of oaks and maples and elms. All of them shooting up wildly, looking for the light. Large trunks lay where they fell after a significant windstorm, embarrassed by their exposed roots toppled to one side. A thick cover of faded dull leaves lay thick across the forest floor.

I can still see her in her cotton white shirt embroidered at the neckline, mint green Bermuda shorts and practical tan shoes. She would reach down, gather us around, and gently push the undergrowth to the side. With the delicacy of a hand model, she would pull back the cover on an earthy Jack-in-the-Pulpit or an elegant Lady Slipper.

She delighted in her success at finding us these special flora amongst all the mundane. For the rest of the outing we’d hear on repeat, “Weren’t we so lucky to find the red trillium, weren’t we? ” White trillium carpets the woods in the early spring before the leaves emerge, but we found ourselves nodding in agreement at the fortitude at coming across the red variety. How could you not get caught up in her enthusiasm?

As we got older my brothers lost interest in her guided tours or took up spending hours on my grandfather’s aluminum fishing boat. But I continued to tag along. She’d hear from someone in town where blueberry bushes had been spotted in some wayside ditch on a remote up-north road. With couple of empty plastic ice cream buckets in the back of her red VW bug, off we’d go to find what the woods had to offer us.

“Look,” she would say. Look at the bloom, the owl, the stream, the berries, the poison Ivy! Look. If I have any skills in observing nature, it is thanks to my Oma.

Borderlands

There is a space where the private market slides up next to the public goods market. This is where decisions over which products and services are best produced under an esprit de competition and which are best served through cooperative efforts are flushed out like pheasant from the wayside ditch. A Minnesota writer, Aaron Brown, wrote about this landscape in a piece entitled The troubled border between consumption and conservation. The issue on his mind is the ongoing tension between the desire for jobs from mining and the environmental impact they create.

How countries have handled these two spheres in their political choices is not what is being discussed here. This is more local than sweeping observations on governance directions towards socialism or communism or capitalist democracies. (Even though, it might be observed with a bit of irony that China has shown the agility of a communist state to profit from capitalist models. And whereas NIMY and YIMBY forces tie US cities into knots, China is using more private enterprise to build its cities.) Brown leads your focus past levels of national governance, past levels of state governance, past overlays of activism, and bring you right down into his back yard.

Bears fall limp on trampolines. Moose tangle in hammocks. Tourists lose themselves in the woods, their dying cellphones lighting a doomed path even deeper into the wilderness.

Then the helicopters come, looking for the source of the signal. They scare up the birds as their blades sweep across the marsh reeds. The metal dragons return to their dens. So it goes along the borderland.

There is a need to micro-manage your attention because this is a saga has been in the air almost as long as All My Children. And at all levels, political players will attempt to obscure the choices, to pull your support to their side. The weapon du jour is a miscasting of identity. If you value communal interest, then you must be a communist. If you voice support of one political party, then friends may find reason to exclude from their next dinner party. The activist entreats you to wear their hats, wave their banners. At all levels teams are built to harness political voice

This last round was at the national level, as two days ago the Interior Department revoked a lease for a mining project. The 2019 renewal of the lease during the previous administration was considered improper. There was no new evidence of environmental harm.

Twin Metals, in its own statement, excoriated the Biden administration and called the decision “a political action intended to stop the Twin Metals project without conducting the environmental review prescribed in law.” 

https://www.courthousenews.com/interior-department-revokes-minnesota-mine-leases/

The campaign to save the boundary water’s chair declared this a “win.” One might as well be following the sports section.

That’s why Brown needs to capture your attention, pull you away from power plays and home runs, and back to the arts. He paints the issues out in more romantic depth than the Hudson River School of American artists. He wants you to consider choices over a variety of time frames. The spaces where public and private choices intermingle have cascading impacts and generational persistence. I wish more writers lingered here longer.

The borderlands are where interesting questions are answered. Aaron Brown lays some groundwork on how to navigate the space between two competing spheres of human interest.

What’s in a house price

All we’ve heard for the last several years is how the price of housing is going up. Up. UP! And for the most part that is true. Whether it is because Millennials are finally getting on their feet and need a place to have their own families, or whether the baby boomers are not moving to the lower priced condos and giving up their family homes, there is no doubt that there is a housing squeeze.

But seriously, for as long as I can remember, except in deep recessions, people have thought housing is expensive. Because it is! It is the largest portion of people’s monthly budget. And this distraction about the cost of a home is the most uninteresting fact one can take away from home prices. House prices are a rich reflection of the revealed preferences of a community.

An economist in the early part of the twentieth century by the name of Paul Samuelson came up with the idea that when consumers chose different products, they reveal what best suits their needs. This differed from theories up to that point which placed the burden on policy makers to decide which goods provided the greatest utility to consumers.

Samuelson’s relationship with economics is lengthy. This excerpt paints the broadest brush of his brilliance. “In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.”

One economist, his junior by twenty years, heard the clarion call for greater mathematical representation of economic theory. Zvi Griliches contributed to a publication called Economic Statistics and Econometrics published in 1968. In a paper called Hedonic Price Indexes for Automobiles: An Economic Analysis of Quality Change, Zvi pulled apart the prices for automobiles so that he could show how much consumers were paying for improved engines or length of the vehicle or other features. By comparing the components of the cost of vehicles he distinguished between inflation and consumers revealing a preference for higher quality provided by advanced technology.

But back to real estate. The economist credited for using this statistical method (taking the price of a complex product and using data to divvy out the weighted values of its various components) was Sherwin Rosen in his 1974 paper Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Product Differentiation in Pure Competition. Now this is exciting! The price of a house can tell you how much one school district is favored over another. It can tell you the value effects of violent crime, or proximity to mass transit.

The implicit prices tell us that we trade in public goods as well as private goods. We shop for city services and good roads, for youth programming and parks, as well as for good schools and safe streets. The implicit prices tell us how groups of people choose bundles of public goods. Real estate prices are incredibly rich with feedback.

So can we stop with the “They are so expensive.”

PADI- an associational case study

Say one wanted to figure out the impact of participating in affiliations with the professional association of diving instructors or PADI. First off we could identify three groups that are major players with the association: the dive shops, the instructors or dive masters and the divers who show up to be taken down to the ocean floor.

As I’ve attempted to sketch out each of these groups which internalize (listed inside the circle) and externalize benefits and costs in the relationship.

The divers, for instance, are willing to pay more to go on a two tank dive with a PADI shop and may adjust their travel plans or hotel selection to coordinate with the shop. But they do this because they feel they will experience a safer dive and see more sea life.

The dive masters who took us out in Kauai all had worked elsewhere including Honduras, Texas and the Caribbean. They also showed an active interest in the health and quality of the reefs in Hawaii and abroad. Just like so many outdoors men and women, they are important supporters of the environment they so enjoy, externalizing that knowledge and concern in so many ways.

Lastly the dive shops are able to charge more and internalize those profits but also must externalize the support and higher standards observed by the association.

Each of these actors are evaluating trade offs and making consumer choices in both fiscal matters as well as the degree of voluntary work or other concessions made in order to be part of the association.

A two tank dive isn’t simply $150USD. To get a grasp of the complete transaction would necessitate tracking all the components at time of exchange.

The other interesting aspect of this type of analysis is to see how externalize factors can be transferred between the groups of actors which come in touch with each other. For instance the dive masters are passionate about reef environment. As divers come through their work place there may be ways to capture idle assets to further reef preservation.

Scuba diving is an underwater stroll

With the help of a vest and air source, a diver can sink to the ocean floor and have a look around. Instead of walking a trail and spotting robins and blue jays, the reefs spit out the whitespotted Toby, or the devil scorpion fish (my favorite), or the coffee table sized sea turtles.

Scuba diving is an enjoyable hobby which has gotten more and more popular in recent years. PADI, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, reports that they hold certifications for 28 million underwater strollers worldwide. A certification is the end result of passing a course and an open water swim exam.

PADI® (Professional Association of Diving Instructors®) is the world’s largest ocean exploration and diver organization, operating in 186 countries and territories, with a global network of more than 6,600 dive centers and resorts and over 128,000 professional members worldwide. Issuing more than 1 million certifications each year, and with over 28 million certifications to date, PADI enables people around the world to seek adventure and save the ocean through underwater education, life-changing experiences and travel. For over 50 years, PADI is undeniably The Way the World Learns to Dive®, maintaining its high standards for dive training, safety and customer service, monitored for worldwide consistency and quality.

From either the PADI linked page or FB page

The organization was started in 1966 by a couple of guys who didn’t like the status quo and wanted to do something better. Given its worldwide reach, one can’t help but wondering how they got established and grew into the association of choice.

This isn’t a situation of government setting up a bunch of rules and allocating a means of enforcement. This is associational work. Why people choose this certification process would be something to consider.

Compatibility, a review

I recently switched to an iphone after years of android use. It has been fun to compare their functionality. The ease of the transition is a tribute to Apple’s focus on the user experience. There is one feature, however, that I miss. It is Google Lens. My last phone was Google Pixel and the Google Lens icon is at the lower right hand side of the screen when you open a jpg. For instance, as I sort through some old travel photos from my youth, I often want to know where a shot was taken. Check Google Lens- Presto! It matches the image to ones on Google Maps.

Fath Ali Shah

I tried all sorts of methods to store and open this image from Iran on my new phone but gave up, and went back to my Google Pixel. Tapping on the picture on my old device summoned up web results which identified the location in seconds. The 4000 BC etching is located under a fortified wall at Rey Castle, near Teheran. Subsequent postings by the collective of google map supporters offered views of the image and surrounding landscape from multiple angles.

More than likely I’ll discover how to use Google Lens on my new device. But the fact that so many features are user friendly and this one is not made me reflect on how we are at the mercy of structures easily within our reach. And how we don’t make time (partly because we may not appreciate the benefits) of structures which we have yet to discover.

During the lockdown my family and I started a daily walk routine as it is good exercise and it was one of the few activities open to us. We used aps to monitor distances and times, and struck out looking for new scenic trails. I’m not sure how many times we shook our heads in disbelief that we had only now discovered so many pleasing miles in our figurative back yard.

On a recent trip to Calgary I discovered the ease and reliability of public transit. It was forced on me by the difficulty to secure a rental car in the era of Covid. This reminded me of when I took my kids on the Great Northern Railroad from Minneapolis to Glacier National Park. The line runs from Chicago out to Seattle skirting the northern most border of the US States. It appealed to me as it gave me a break from road tripping with young children and I thought it would make an impression on them. Many of the other passengers from places like Minot, Culbertson and Wolf Point used the rail frequently. It was their preferred form of transportation.

The dominance of some IT structures has made me wonder about other patterns in my life which have steered my activities. Where else have decisions kept me from advantageous experiences? What other take-it-for-granted services are people not using optimally which would make their lives better? And how can we reveal those little connectors to better engage a just-next-door infrastructure we have yet to discover?

Last thoughts- Missoula

We had some extra time for a walk around Missoula. Parking the car on a spur of a road near the University, we struck out on this path leading us westward along side the Clark Fork River.
The trail infrastructure was quite good. Paths were wide and used by cyclists, walkers and runners. This pedestrian bridge allowed for a scenic river crossing.
If you’re going to have a bench- might as well create an artistic setting.
After getting in a good walk, stop in at one of coffee houses in the historic downtown for a latte and slice of pie.

The Midwest spirit of place

Native plants of the Midwest, Alan Branhagen

How better to set a stage than to describe its landscape. Alan Branhagen sets about cataloguing all the plants native to the Midwest in a photo filled book with nice descriptions. He is affiliated with the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, said to be one of the leading botanical gardens in the country. I certainly enjoy spending an afternoon touring various landscapes. Should you ever visit the Minneapolis St. Paul area, I hope you do as well.

Hedonic approach vs user frequency, which is better?

The paper, Recreational and Resource Economic Values for the Peconic Estuary System, by James J. Opalueh, Thomas Grigalunas, Jerry Diamantides, Marisa Mazzotta, and Robert Johnston was written in 1999 as a study of the value of the Peconic Estuary system on the eastern end of Long Island. They used four methods to estimate value, but let’s compare just the first two: the hedonic pricing method using home values as the dependent variable, and a travel cost study. Here’s their introduction:

I.B. 1. Introduction and Overview


No single method can capture the value of the variety of services provided by the natural assets of the PES. Recognizing the many uses of PES natural resources, we designed and implemented a suite of four non-market valuation studies in order to provide estimates of the value of particular services:


(1) A Property Value study examines the contribution of environmental amenities to the market price of property. Using the Town of Southold as a case study, the Property Value study was designed to measure values of amenities to residents living in the immediate vicinity.


(2) A Travel Cost study uses original survey results to estimate outdoor recreational uses in the PES and the economic value that users have for four, key PES outdoor recreation activities: swimming, boating, fishing, and bird and wildlife viewing. This study also examines the impact that (A) water quality has on the number of trips and the value of swimming and (B) the effect of the catch rate on recreational fishing, important recreational uses of the estuary and activities much affected by water quality and resource abundance.

page 11.

Now this report looks at a fairly significant natural amenity, but isn’t the idea that residents place value on any public open space going to be subject to the same analysis? Whether a park with playground equipment, a lake with a swimming beach or a ravine with hiking trails; all these open spaces are valued both by homeowners who live in close proximity as well as others who come just for a visit.

The first approach the authors use to estimate a value of the public amenity is to calculate the portion of the home sale prices which can be attributed to the proximity of the natural resource. The idea behind the process is, if you could have exactly the same home, how would the value of the home change as it moved away (or toward) the public amenity.

We apply economic methods using the property value (or “hedonic” method) to a database comprised of all Southold real estate transactions in 1996 and GIS parcel coverage data for the town. Briefly, the analysis estimates correlations between property values and levels of valued environmental attributes, including open space.

page 27

Here is a further explanation on how the regression model works:

The Property Value technique is based on the assumption that a relationship exists between the market value of a property, and the characteristics of the property. The Property Value method uses a statistical technique called “multiple regression” to assess the impact of each characteristic on the market value of the property. The technique simultaneously compares a large number of properties with different prices and different levels of each characteristic. The method establishes which characteristics are associated with higher values, which are associated with lower values, and which have no significant impact on values. The model also estimates the dollar magnitude of these impacts–that is, it estimates how large an impact is likely to be caused by a specific level of a specific characteristic. Using this technique, the impact of different environmental amenities on nearby property values can be estimated.4 The technical details of the property value model (or hedonic technique) are presented in Appendix A.

page 16

Please read further through their paper for the statistical details, but what I would like to focus on is the equity, or capital, which is captured in each home due to its association with a public amenity. Buyers and sellers in a well functioning marketplace are bidding on the homes and thus determining what the market will bare for this infrastructure (not sure why it is considered a non-market approach). There is a premium in the offer price for greater access, hence they are pricing out the desirability of the public good.

In addition to what the authors derive as dollar figures for the market value retained by residential properties, they also note that there is value to people who use the estuary from a distance. This value is derived by a second process in step two. It is done by estimating number of visits, or trips made to use the open space. In a sense it is a user fee estimation.

I think they go awry by shifting from a capital perspective to a user perspective. We pay our water bills on a user based system but that does not represent the value of having the pipes in place to pump fresh water to all residents. And certainly metro user fees do not equate with the cost of installing mass transit. Analyzing visits more appropriately syncs with management issues such as how many lifeguards to have on duty, how often the trash bins need to be emptied and so on.

I offer a platter perspective for the inclusion of the value to the greater public who use the estuary. The residents adjacent to the estuary, who enjoy a view over an open space and a walking trail out their back yard, enjoy one level of access. The group of people who live in the local town have another relationship. And people who visit from across the county may derive yet another coefficient in front of the data which represents access to natural amenities within their reach.

At each level exists in an eco system- or platter– and a data set representative of the value of these public goods.

Timing a move

People move households a variety of times throughout their lives for a variety of reasons. Depending on your data source, Americans move every 7-9 years, with more frequent moves in young adulthood and more sedentary behavior in later life.

This makes sense. As folks move through different stages of life, both from an income stand point and a lifestyle standpoint, they want a different combinations of neighborhood amenities. These are not questions of ‘good’ things versus ‘bad’ things. These are simply mixtures of choices.

When you are young you may want to live near entertainment and restaurants. Once there are kids in the household, going out to shows and restaurants quickly takes a back seat to prioritizing daycare, schools, and after school activities. Stability of residence can be important at this stage as rearing children benefits from consistency.

If the norm is to move, to seek out new living arrangements that better suit new objectives, than wouldn’t incentives that lock people into a location be holding them back? Financial incentives such as rent control do exactly that. It discourages mobility.

And I’m not saying people who need help shouldn’t still receive help. I’m saying that paying people to live in the same set of living circumstance through all stages of their lives goes against the norm. Which leads one to believe it is a drawback in the long run, for a perceive protection in the short run.

Walking the Lakes

For whatever reason walking suits me. It’s good exercise. Conversation always flows, so a companion is a good idea. And you never know what you might stumble across. This evening is was a doe and a fawn traipsing up from the shore of Medicine Lake and meandering through the lawns as if the neighbors didn’t mind.

I’m in good company. William Wordsworth was a walker too, in his Lake District.

Sweet was the walk along the narrow lane
At noon, the bank and hedge-rows all the way
Shagged with wild pale green tufts of fragrant hay,
Caught by the hawthorns from the loaded wain,
Which Age with many a slow stoop strove to gain;
And childhood, seeming still most busy, took
His little rake; with cunning side-long look,
Sauntering to pluck the strawberries wild, unseen.
Now, too, on melancholy’s idle dreams
Musing, the lone spot with my soul agrees,
Quiet and dark; for through the thick wove trees
Scarce peeps the curious star till solemn gleams
The clouded moon, and calls me forth to stray
Thro’ tall, green, silent woods and ruins grey.

Sweet Was the Walk: A Poem by William Wordsworth

Now to learn to write poetry!

Aesthetics and Solar Roofs

Elon Musk has stated that 2021 will be a key year for the Solar Roof, with the CEO noting that its potential would be evident this year. Considering the company’s ongoing rollout of the integrated PV system and the development of better Solar Roof designs, it may only be a matter of time before more customers of Tesla’s flagship residential solar product would have more design options available. 

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-solar-roof-colored-textured-tiles-patent/

Aesthetics is one stumbling block in consumers’ embrace of solar energy. A look that blends into the standard architectural asphalt shingles, or clay roof tiles, would be more consumer friendly than panels.

NorthStar MLS

Attractive shingles will undoubtedly command greater appeal than shiny 24 x 24 inch panels set into a large framework.

Tesla’s Solarglass Roof tiles are already among the most aesthetically-pleasing PV systems in the market. A Solar Roof installation involves the setup of both PV and non-PV roof tiles, and according to Tesla, this could present some issues. Since some tiles do not have solar cells in them, there will be some angles or times when it is possible to distinguish which tiles have solar cells and which do not. 

credit: Patentscope

Tesla also produces a lithium home battery, called a powerwall, which can store energy from the panels to be used after dark, during peak pricing hours.

The Tesla Powerwall pairs well with solar panel systems, especially if your utility has reduced or removed net metering, introduced time-of-use rates, or instituted demand charges. Installing a storage solution like the Tesla Powerwall with a solar energy system allows you to maintain a sustained power supply during the day or night, as long as you store enough power from your panels when the sun is shining.

https://news.energysage.com/tesla-powerwall-battery-complete-review/

With cost for the battery alone running around $8-9K, installation of an entire solar system is upwards of $20K. For comparison, a forest air furnace runs around $4-5K. That said, people pay extra for all sorts of social reasons. They use their son-in-law for their mortgage despite higher fees, they buy Girl Scout Cookies (OK, they are delicious too) and bid triple the value of a vacation package at a charity auction. There is an additional expense in buying organic vegetables and sometimes loyalty to one’s barber requires a drive across town. There are many circumstances where one pays above the going rate so that a portion of the price supports a social objective. Still- the premium has its limits. And solar power isn’t quite affordable enough to reach the mainstream concerned, yet.

In the end it is all about the payback and reliability, especially in a harsh climate. Natural gas is very affordable, but its infrastructure is not available throughout the state. Homes that rely on electric baseboard heat will most likely be the first to tackle the significant upfront investment and convert to solar.

Labor Wedge

Some words or phrases latch onto you like thistles while walking through blooming prairie grasses. They tag onto your pant leg until you notice them and pluck them off for a closer look. Labor wedge has such a nice visual, a separation between what a model is predicting and the empirical data, I think that’s how it wedged its way into my thoughts.

It seems to be a fairly new macroeconomic term, defined at the start of a paper by Loukas Karabarbounis, University of Chicago, as:

Do fluctuations of the labor wedge, defined as the gap between the firm’s marginal product of labor (MPN) and the household’s marginal rate of substitution (MRS), reflect fluctuations of the gap between the MPN and the real wage or fluctuations of the gap between the real wage and the MRS? For many countries and most forcefully for the United States, fluctuations of the labor wedge predominantly reflect fluctuations of the gap between the real wage and the MRS.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19015/w19015.pdf

At different time periods, American households have found it advantageous to substitute out paid work for something else. They preferred to spend their time, perhaps at home, performing valued activities for their families. Or perhaps the value was found in associational life of another nature. De Tocqueville said years ago that Americans are apt at associational life.

More interesting are the measuring questions. How do we categorize where people have the opportunity to perform duties which build capital for themselves and, most probably, their communities? Where are they exerting energies in lieu of showing up for a paycheck?

Sorting by their economic benefit seems sensible. If the ambitions fall under health related activities (staying out of the workforce to care for an aging parent) then the credit goes to pubic health. If education (during these Covid times people are staying out the workforce to supervise their children’s education) is the goal then shuffle those hours to the public education column of the ledger. If governance (people are choosing to spend their time on park boards or citizen commissions instead of working) is where the hours are spent, then register the tally under civics, and so on.

A better understanding of these motives and ventures will smooth out the prickly problem of labor wedges.

Efficient to the X degree

In a Bloomberg article yesterday, Laura Millan Lombrana encouraged governments attending the United Nations climate talks to push oil and gas companies to fix methane leaks. Due to new satellite technology, which helps identify the location of the seepage, there is an economic efficiency argument to such action.

Methane emissions need to fall 70% over the next decade, a decline equivalent to eliminating CO₂ emissions from all cars and trucks across Asia, according to the report. Fixing methane leaks would be cost-effective for energy companies because the captured methane can be sold as natural gas. The cost of repairs and maintenance needed to capture methane can often be paid for by the value of the additional gas brought to the market. 

The new information (as to where the pipes are leaking) is one driver for action, but there is also the notion that the low emissions benchmark, set in the Covid year, offers up a new goal. This combination of information and technology coupled with motivation, made me think of Harvey Lieberman’s concept of “X”-Efficiency. He was a professor at Harvard and is best known for coining this concept. Here’s how he describes it in Allocative Efficiency vs. “X”-Efficiency.

Our primary concern is with the broader issue of allocative efficiency versus an initially undefined type of efficiency that we shall refer to as “X-efficiency.” The magnitude and nature of this type of efficiency is examined in Sections II and III. Although a major element of “X- efficiency” is motivation, it is not the only element, and hence the terms “motivation efficiency” or “incentive efficiency” have not been employed.

He identifies the possibility of meeting a higher efficiency with new motivations, usually in combination with other factors. In the Bloomberg article, the sense of urgency around climate change motivates fixing the methane leaks.

The level of unit cost depends in some measure on the degree of X-efficiency, which in turn depends on the degree of competitive pressure, as well as on other motivational factors. The responses to such pressures, whether in the nature of effort, search, the utilization of new information, is a significant part of the residual in economic growth.

It’s hard to know for sure, but it sure seems like Leibenstein’s “X”-Efficiency refers to the efficiency attained in the blending of the public and private spheres.

MN comes in at #2 to raise a family

According to research by Wallet Hub, here are the top five states in order:

RankStateScore ‘Family Fun’ ‘Health & Safety’‘Education & Child Care’ ‘Affordability’ 
1Massachusetts60.889103621
2Minnesota60.571458115
3North Dakota60.103372141
4New York59.802216547
5Vermont59.164015274

Raising a healthy, stable family sometimes requires moving to a new state. And the reasons for moving are often similar: career transitions, better schools, financial challenges or a general desire to change settings. Wants and needs don’t always align in a particular state, though. For instance, a state might offer a low income-tax rate but have a subpar education system. However, families do not need to make these kinds of tradeoffs. They can avoid such problems by knowing which states offer the best combination of qualities that matter most to parents and their kids.

The column on the far right is title ‘Social Economics.’ The full report is here.

Can we see some numbers, please?

Say an individual, Bob, is concerned about a public good, like the environment. He decides to make a new year’s resolution to do something about it. Over a two to three year period, he activates others in his industry to legislate a testing requirement that costs the consumers, say, $200 on average per transaction. Note that this organizing and petitioning and writing communications and attending meetings was all done outside of the pay-check sphere of life.

One of the objectors to the added commission-for-the-public-good points out that, other than providing information, the testing will not give rise to any tangible reductions in green house emissions. Bob and his cohorts respond that doing something is better than doing nothing. Is he right?

Now let’s say that instead of doing the testing one could give the $200 to the client to not use their personal vehicle for a month, or to not take an airplane trip. In both scenarios there would be a measurable and immediate impact on green house emissions. Given these choices, it’s fair to say that there are other ways to spend $200 which would result in a greater impact on the goal to reduce global warming.

Numbers must be run so the public has a means of comparison. While everyone is working on (lobbying for, debating in favor of) one idea, other more valuable ideas are neglected, omitted from the realm of public consideration. Even though no one received payment for their time, the capacity of a community to engage and respond was tapped. So despite Bob’s sincere interest in climate change, doing nothing is, in fact, better than advocating for an unsubstantiated claim.

Now let’s say Bob was particularly talented at organizing and galvanizing folks around a cause. And due to this success he continued to seek approval and status through this type of work. The impetus for action transforms to status seeking, increasing Bob’s private persona, versus the stated tangible impact to any group concern. Now, in an error of commission, a form of corruption, starts to germinate.

The answer is not to stop the Bobs of the world. Hardly. The intent of this blog is to encourage the meaningful enumeration of choices; to clarify the resources used as inputs and record the increases in public capacity and capital; the intent is to provide the information necessary to steer Bob’s ambitions to the most productive choices.

WWF, Neocolonial?

The World Wildlife Fund is the largest conservation organization in the world. Born of the passions of the 60’s, it established a foothold in Kenya when the organization purchased 37,000 acres adjacent to Lake Nakuru in 1973.

Eco-tourism is a big player in Kenya’s GDP, coming in at close to 10%. Despite this economic success, decades of outside influence on the care and preservation of wildlife has some expressing tension around land use.

The conservancy, portrayed in this BBC clip, celebrates the initiatives of local ownership.

Nashulai Maasai Conservancy , is the first ever community led and managed Conservancy which has been created to on the borders of the Maasai Mara National Reserve . The conservancy has been established for wildlife conservation but the local community would also live within the area and share it with both wildlife and livestock . It is a mixed model Conservancy the first of its kind in Mara

The point to be made here is that what was an agreeable arrangement 47 years ago, two generations or so, may no longer have the same feel to it. At that time perhaps there was insufficient home-grown ability to manage the parks, and as the shared objective of wildlife preservation still appealed to all, it was advantageous to have outsiders come in and put everything in place.

What was appealing and profitable in a social, ecological and financial sense, a half a century ago, is showing some wear. Now that the outsiders are no longer needed, they are pirates. They are taking instead of giving. Time has changed the circumstances.

The purpose of public art

A bright blue rooster showed up on the Minneapolis skyline a few years back. Minnesota Public Radio ran a piece on the installation.

The rooster stands atop a brushed stainless steel plinth for a total height of almost 25 feet. An earlier edition of the sculpture stood in Trafalgar Square in London for several months. Fritsch is known for presenting everyday objects in a new and provocative light.

In 2017 the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, home to the adult male chicken, got a complete overhaul. The garden sits between Parade Stadium and the SW side of downtown, lining up like an elaborate front yard to the Walker Art Center. You can get a glimpse of the blue bird through the garden.

Before the avian monument’s appearance, The Spoonbridge and Cherry was the iconic Minneapolis placemaker. Since 1986 this whimsical piece was a prominent feature on all the brochures meant to lure tourists to our largest city. Which makes the argument, that at least one objective for public art, is to create a photogenic avatar.

As it turns out, Minneapolis is full of public art–69 installation is all. If you visit Minneapolis you’ll have to check out the self guided tours listed on the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation site. To facilitate planning your tour, there are time estimates for walking, biking or driving. No bike? No worries, Nice Ride has all sorts of stations with bright green bikes you can rent. Here is a screenshot of just the ones in downtown.

How did the city feather a nest so full of art? By getting the public involved, of course. Here’s how it works.

Community Organizations and Private Entities

There are more than 60 artworks in the Minneapolis park system, but only half are owned by MPRB, and they are mostly historic works. The rest are owned and maintained by the City of Minneapolis, community organizations, or private entities who sponsor and care for the artwork while it is hosted on public park land. Thanks to the generous support of these partners, dozens of creative and inspiring artworks are available throughout the park system for all visitors to enjoy. If you or your organization are interested, please see the “Sponsoring Art in Minneapolis Parks” tab.

The purpose and value of public art is more than just placemaking. It signals that residents care about their story, about their environment, about putting an effort to more than just the nuts and bolts of life.

A table set for adversaries

Today is the last day of Minnesota’s gun deer season. My husband texted me an update from his deer stand a week or so ago. The warm weather has made the pre-dawn wake-up calls tolerable and allowed for an extended time hunkered down in camo gear. He reported seeing over fifty deer, almost all does and fawns.

Folks who never leave the urban centers and only experience gun ownership through violence and crime, view hunters as an odd breed. They are a blaze orange part-of-their-problem, an obstacle in tamping down the waywardness of youth. Hunting, however, barely contributes to MN mortality rates. The numbers show that fatalities from car collisions with deer are several times higher than death by fire arm while hunting. In 2019 there were 3 deaths on the roads, yet no deaths amongst the 841,063 individuals who bought deer hunting licenses.

The sport is safe enough to be conducted on a limited bases amongst the old growth oaks and quaking aspen in the 136,900 acres of parkland in the greater Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area. Most of the deer hunts in the urban parks are for archery hunters (including crossbow if you are old enough, seniors get the priveledge of extra power). It is noted that the parks and trails remain open except during the few opportunities to rifle hunt, in which case the entire park closes.

It is the fortieth anniversary of the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association which attracts 20,000 members throughout the state. They “ensure that the culture of deer hunting in Minnesota is being upheld by improving opportunities through: Habitat, Education, Legislation/Advocacy.” Their on-line calendar is full of meetings, 7-gun raffles and holidays parties across the 400 chapters with names like Snake River, Crow River, Sturgeon River and Smokey Hills.

You wouldn’t think these gun toting outstaters would find themselves politically aligned with folks who wish to fund the MN Opera, Walker Art Center or Guthrie Theater. You wouldn’t think that they would sit at a table with earnest faced, clipboard toting environmentalists. But politically these two groups aligned on the matter of the health and welfare of our lakes and streams.

Minnesota voters approved the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment to the state constitution in 2008. Beginning in 2009 and continuing through 2034, the Amendment increases the sales and use tax rate by three-eighths of one percent. Amendment dollars are dedicated to four separate funds, one of which is the Clean Water Fund.

The amendment was passed with 56% of the vote. The hunters weren’t going to let the deer herd drink from contaminated ditches, even if they think regulations on other commercial concerns are a bridge too far. And the urban activists simply had to put their resist impulses away for awhile and ignore their other objections to their fellow Minnesotans.

In the first year following the approval, the cash infusion was a little over $213 million, and to date the Minnesota Legacy has appropriated $2.9 billion. Basically there have been very few controversies with the implementation of the fund which allocates money into four pools: Arts and Cultural Heritage, Clean Water, Outdoor Heritage and Parks and Trails. All of the projects are listed for the public to see by the legislature.

So how do you find the adversaries to invite to your next dinner party? Look to where your guests spend their time and efforts. Don’t only invite the vocal ones, the emphatic chirpers. Look for the quiet ones too, doing the work of community. When the cause at hand intersects their activities, a stream of resources can be engaged, even among long standing rivals.

New city, new energy

From the BBC:

On the edge of the Saudi Arabian desert beside the Red Sea, a futuristic city called Neom is due to be built. The $500bn (£380bn) city – complete with flying taxis and robotic domestic help – is planned to become home to a million people. And what energy product will be used both to power this city and sell to the world? Not oil. Instead, Saudi Arabia is banking on a different fuel – green hydrogen. 

7 Billion for a Transportation Revolution

That’s the election news from Austin, Texas. A pretty hefty purchase for a metro of 2.2 million people. More on the deets from the local Patch:

The project came in two separate parts for voters, Proposition A and Proposition B — both of which gained support from the majority of registered voters. The former, which passed with 59 percent of the vote, calls for an 8.75-cent increase per $100 valuation to the city’s property tax rate, resulting in around a 4 percent increase to the total bill, toward a high-capacity transit system known as Project Connect. Prop B, which passed with 68 percent of the vote, provides for $460 million in debt issuance toward transportation improvements —sidewalks, bikeways, urban trails, safety projects and the like.

This wasn’t the first run at a rail transportation package in the capital of Texas. It wasn’t for lack of need. The urban’s center’s population growth for the decade ending in 2018 was 37%. Yet two prior funding attempts had failed. This time things were different.

“There were three main arguments that were made,” says Austin mayor Steve Adler. “One was congestion. One was climate change. One was mobility equity in our city.”

This time the city was all in. The focus was not only on light rail to improve commute times and to connect various parts of the city, goals which appeal to those who could better use the hour from a daily commute, and to those who prioritize emission reduction. But the plan also provides for “transportation infrastructure including sidewalks, transportation-related bikeways, urban trails, transportation safety projects (Vision Zero), safe routes to school and substandard streets.”

Let’s count the public objectives: transit, health, environment, access to jobs, recreation, safety. And lest you think they forgot about housing:

The plan, funded by an increase in property taxes, also includes $300 million to help make sure that as transportation improves in some neighborhoods and housing values rise, residents aren’t displaced from their homes due to gentrification. They’ll do this by offering rent subsidies, building more affordable housing, and giving financial assistance to home buyers. 

Austin’s business success and hence population boom has put it in the enviable position of having a need for all these public projects as well as the financial ability to fund them, which they have tied directly to the assessed values of real estate.

But what about cities that just need one of those amenities, or even just a leg of light rail, or upgrades to a suite of bridges, or replacement of a water treatment facility? What are the standard pricing mechanisms and what are they tied back to in such a way that is financially acceptable to all those who support the improvement? What are the combinations that upsell a project and close the deal, such as this one in Austin?

Minnesota passed a 1.87 billion bonding at the fifth special session held in 2020. Two years of touring and evaluating worthy projects, and still the delays and posturing and addon’s. The beauty of a standardized pricing mechanism is that the crazy haggling is reduced to more amenable swings. And more importantly people don’t feel the hazy disbelief that I did when I walked away from a souk off the central square in Marrakesh after paying $20 for two sad sticks of incense.

Put me in title

In the is-it-private-or-is-it-public game, I agree that a home is a private good. The event which makes you a home owner is a closing, which in Minnesota, is usually held at a title company. On the chosen day the buyers and sellers sit down (pre-Covid) and the buyers sign up for a mortgage to finance the purchase while the sellers sign over a warranty deed. Done deal. No take-backs. The fees include a little state tax and filing fees so the documents are filed publicly in the county recorders office.

The process almost seems trivial but it so powerful. This singing over of a title and its public recording in a government office is the most significant feature of private wealth in the US system.

Interestingly, there are a whole assortment of local norms and customs revolving around closings across the United States. Most states either close at the table or over an escrow period. In Wyoming, however, real estate agents conduct the closings. Also specified and unique to almost every state is a foreclosure process. Most weigh heavily on consumer protection. And here is an interesting table breaking down all the nit picky processes and fees.

Owning a home is a staple of the American dream. Owning a home ties you to a community where you participate in measure of all public venues: public safety, pubic schools, public transportation, parks trails and the environment, governance and civic pride.

Energy Scoring coming to your Neighborhood

There is a movement to provide home energy index scores for home that are going up for sale. It would accompany the homeowners’ disclosure. The Department of Energy provides this explanation in a lengthy document from 2017.

Like a miles-per-gallon rating for a car, the Home Energy Score is an easy-to-produce rating designed to help homeowners and homebuyers gain useful information about a home’s energy performance. Based on an in-home assessment that can be completed in less than an hour, the Home Energy Score not only lets a homeowner understand how efficient the home is and how it compares to others, but also provides recommendations on how to cost-effectively improve the home’s energy efficiency.

Like the stickers in the car windows which provide information on gas consumption, or the label on food products itemizing their contents, a house will be given a score between 1-10. The State of Oregon’s website has a nice, concise, easy-to-read page about the process. Here’s the first part about the score:

I’m just not convinced it’s that simple. When goods are new, whether a car, or a furnace or even a whole house, I think a scoring system could have some value. A home that has had a variety of owners, over six, seven, ten decades, some keeping them squeaky clean, some letting slide a whole host of maintenance and repairs issues, would prove to have a difficult history to rank from 1-10. The full report from the Department of Energy is long and strenuous to follow, and probably a better reflection of the complexity of scoring an entire structure.

The mandate for standardized nutritional facts labeling on food has been in place since 1990. The obesity rates, however, in the US continue to rise from 12% in 1990 to 23% by 2005 to upwards of 35% in some states in 2019. Despite being notified of what they are buying (which to be perfectly clear I am in favor of) consumer’s eating habits are becoming worse not better. Forcing businesses to label is something the government has the power to do, but it doesn’t mean it will be effective in accomplishing the goal.

If the goal is to persuade homeowners to spend extra money on home energy improvements, the tactic I would pursue is to search out the most likely group that has shown interest in this purchase. Retirees on a fixed income are good examples. The combination of desiring a low monthly obligation and of being at a point in life when there is extra money for this versus other activities, leads their homes to often having superior mechanicals (which undoubtedly offsets the dated décor). Or if you really want people to seal up the cracks in their homes so all the a/c doesn’t leak out in the summer nor heat in the winter, team up with the pest control people. I promiss that moms will pay a lot to plug up all the holes and keep the mice out.

Wood Ducks

I often stop at local parks, especially when I’m in an unfamiliar part of town. First off it is an incentive to maintain a regular walking regime. And you can almost always glean some insights into a community from its parks and trail system.

Yesterday I stopped at one which featured Nature Center in its name. Yet there was no building next to the forty by forty spread of asphalt off a deadend road, perhaps a half-mile from the heavily used I694 loop around the cities. Only the entrance sign confirmed I was in the right spot.

The trail led under a gorgeous canopy tall oak trees. Through all the dead fallen wood you could see a pond down to the left covered in a thick coat of pea green.

The signage was ambitious, from the greeting sign and then a series of signs denoting stations along the walk, pointing out the flora and fauna along the circular path around the pond. They were faded, and the plastic coverings cracked and damaged.

As the path descended down toward the water the noise of ducks alerted one to a large grouping of fowl. I first spotted a nice looking mallard. Then, hacking through the brambles and low brush to get a better look, a gaggle of no less than thirty wood ducks came into view.

If you’re a bird watcher seeing a glimpse of just a pair of these birds, with their exotically detailed plumage, is exciting. This site caught me spellbound.

My first impression of this park led me to feel sympathetic for the folks who must have spent so much time getting this 24 acre green space established. How disappointed they would be by the overgrowth and neglected beamed steps cut into the hill bank, washout at points here and there.

But I’ve changed my mind. Those folks, having invested work into this vision would probably be delighted not disappointed. For here was a habitat in the middle of a three and a half million people metro, where families of wood ducks floated contentedly on a pond.

Reminder to self: don’t be too quick to judge someone else’s point-of-view.

Pop quote

Name the author, title and page number (if applicable) for pop quotes and you will receive a grand prize!

On my return home, as I passed the relatively genteel playground near where I live, I noted that its only inhabitants in the late afternoon, with the mothers and the custodian gone were two small boys threatening to bash a little girl with their skates, and an alcoholic who had roused himself to shake his head and mumble that they shouldn’t do that. Farther down the street, on a block with many Puerto Rican immigrants, was another scene of contrast. Twenty-eight children of all ages were playing on the sidewalk without mayhem, arson, or any event more serious than a squabble over a bag of candy. They were under the casual surveillance of adults primarily visiting in public with each other. The surveillance was only seemingly casual, as was proved when the candy squabble broke out and peace and justice were re-established. The identities of the adults kept changing because ferent ones kept putting their heads out the windows, and different ones kept coming in and going out on errands, or passing by and lingering a little. But the numbers of adults stayed fairly constant-between eight and eleven- during the hour I watched. Arriving home, I noticed that at our end of our block, in front of the tenement, the tailor’s, our house, the laundry, the pizza place and the fruit man’s, twelve children were playing on the sidewalk in sight of fourteen adults.