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Thread: Granola Shotgun blog

  1. #1
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    Granola Shotgun blog

    As I mentioned in the "too small" thread in this forum, I've been reading a lot of a blog called "Granola Shotgun". I don't remember quite who pointed me to it (it wasn't here, I don't think). The writer is based in California but ranges all over the country. He discusses architecture, urbanism, suburbanism, ruralism, and more. The post that suckered me into reading was titled, "Let’s Cut the Crap and Embrace Reality".

    His points:
    - We have the built environment that we have and very little of it is ever going to change much physically: "Almost everything ever built in North America has been built since World War II. And nearly all of it is suburban in nature [...] There’s so much of it that even if we wanted to radically transform it all into something different it would take decades."
    - We aren’t going to alter the rules or procedures that govern what gets built to any meaningful degree in most places: "Once [regulations] are established it’s incredibly hard to change any part of the system. All the interlocking and self reinforcing institutions and cultural norms resist change" (n.b., he's not necessarily anti-gubmint; many of these regulations exist for safety reasons [cf. Grenfell Tower] but others exist to manage population types or uses and those are the regulations he believes needs to change)
    - Most local governments don’t have the resources to maintain all the existing infrastructure and public services so winners and losers will emerge as triage sets in: "Winners" won't always be the shiny white suburbs and rural citizens may need to get over the idea of having parity with city-dwellers.
    - Change will absolutely occur, but it will take two forms: large expensive official projects, and sub rosa adaptive behavior: "The primary requirement for getting a waiver from the usual constraints is to build something really expensive and make sure the right people get a piece of the pie. Money must be strategically spread around"
    - Exogenous forces will be the drivers of change: "There will be new [regional] winners and losers shaped by natural cycles, demographic shifts, geopolitics, financial disruptions, resource constraints, and the unintended vulnerabilities enabled by technology."

    The guy doesn't have any letters after his name AFAIK. But he presents an overall premise that has been resonating with me for some time. Constant expansion and consumption does not seem sustainable for the U.S. or the entire world. Not in building/taming open spaces. Not in finances. Not in health care. Not to go all Tea Party on folks, but the stock market does not always go up and even single-payer health care will have to put some limits on care based on the number of people who can/have to pay into the system. I don't believe most Americans are used to thinking there are limits; nor do I believe most of them have the maturity and will to discuss the hard decisions coming up. I also don't believe this is limited to Americans, as we watch a large percentage of Britons figure out that maybe Brexit isn't going to be the "friends-with-benefits" relationship they hoped it would be.

    I invite you to spend a couple of hours reading "Johnny's" blog. Even if you don't agree with him fully (or at all), it's thought-provoking reading.
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

  2. #2
    Senior Member CathyA's Avatar
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    Thanks Steve. It looks interesting. ........but I was going to get my granola recipe before I read much. Then I was wondering how you would load the granola into a shotgun.

  3. #3
    Senior Member catherine's Avatar
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    It is interesting to think about these issues. I went to his blog and I think I need to read it early in the morning. It's hard to imagine the future the way he presents it. I think the suburbs are a really interesting phenomenon, having basically lived in them my entire life, except for a few years in a pretty rural area in upstate NY. The whole idea of the automobile creating a culture. The idea that if I am seen walking out of my neighborhood to a store, my neighbors assume my car has broken down. Little cookie cutter neighborhoods: "Little houses on a hillside, little houses made of ticky-tacky."

    Anyway, Steve, what are your thoughts? Why are you so intrigued by this blog?
    "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
    www.silententry.wordpress.com

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    Where I live, when the houses were new (early to mid twenties), you would go to the end of the block and turn left to go to the neighborhood butcher shop. Turning right, took you about four blocks to the grocery store and the closest gas station (which still has its tanks in the ground). Up two blocks, would take you to the street car.
    My late, second property owner neighbor, said things started changing when they went from the street cars, to the buses. Around that same time, most families were getting their "family" cars (one car per). I see that idea, clearly.

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    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    catherine, I think the author's "Cut The Crap..." post simply made a cogent argument that addressed many thoughts which have bounced around for a while in the back of my mind.

    I am lucky (or smart enough?) to be living in a metro area that is healthy and growing at a manageable rate (not boom or bust). Winters present some challenges to living here, but they are far more surmountable than, say, bringing water to desert metros, and don't have to be dependent on petroleum. Still, rural Minnesota, outside of a few small oases, is almost literally dying -- the kids moved out because there was little work other than farming or mining and a good chunk of the manufacturing that existed outstate (snowmobiles, paper products) has moved to lower-cost states. Yet there still is a tug-of-war between needs and wants in The Cities versus outstate. And we (collectively) have not yet decided how to handle the situation.

    Without devolving this into a political thread, we (collectively) need to realize there is an end to the money. Jobs are going away; they're not coming back, not even in another form. Wages for most people are not keeping up with the increasing price of owning or renting a place to live. Sprawl has been poorly managed, leading to the masses essentially subsidizing those occupying the "new frontier". We cannot build enough lanes on the highways to carry all the people who will use them to move further away from the population center. We (collectively) also do a great job of privatizing gain and socializing loss. We are blowing wads of money like there is no end to it.

    At the same time, people's expectations have gone way up. In the other thread we were discussing what current home-buyers consider outmoded or undesirable, much of that exhibited by older housing stock. They fix that by building new houses at the edges of The Cities. People living in rural Minnesota have come to expect Twin-Cities levels of social services, road-clearing, substance-abuse treatment, etc. though their taxes cannot support them. People living in the Twin Cities resent outstate because the bulk of tax revenues collected here go there.

    Not to say that I have gone all Republican and anti-gubmint here. I believe government serves a vital function in serving the collective public good. And that, as someone once pointed out, taxes are the price one pays for civilization. It just seems to me that there are good places to spend public money and bad places to spend public money. For example, my city, Saint Paul, keeps nibbling away at the hours that recreation centers and libraries are open because "there's not enough money". But there's enough money to kick in $18 million in "infrastructure improvements" for a new pro soccer stadium being built in the city. Really, what is the most effective way to spend that money? On our kids? Or on a private stadium for a multi-millionaire business owner which, almost no doubt, will be termed "unusable" in about 20 years (like almost every other sports arena in town)?

    We don't hold those discussions. We need to. We argue plenty, quite often from a position of "I've got mine" and some really faulty assumptions about "other people" -- that things like poverty and substance abuse are moral failings that can be addressed by working harder or just saying 'no'. Wishing don't make it so. We have to get past that. Shotgun Granola, for me, is a good start at scoping these issues down to our "built environment" and starting to address them.
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

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    Senior Member catherine's Avatar
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    Well, first of all, you do live in a great place. I love Minnesota, I love Minnesotans (my brother moved there 40 years ago, and I always enjoy going out there to see him and his family).

    I re-read the article on a cup of coffee. Here are some initial thoughts, and keep in mind, I'm not a civil engineer, or a prognosticator.

    First, as I said, I've spent many decades living in suburbs--outside of Bridgeport/New Haven, in Milford CT; outside of NYC in Westchester; and between NYC and Philadelphia in NJ.

    The town I live in now, and lived in since 1985, was until quite recently a rural area. The church I went to in the 80s and 90s was largely made up township farmers. The Grange Hall still existed. But over the past 30 years, a farmer would die and a housing development would go up. I used to measure the months by the height of the corn as I drove through the town. But no more. If there is ever a town that was built as a response to people in Brooklyn finally owning a car and being able to get the hell out of Brooklyn and still work in New York, my town was it. In my mind, there was VERY little thought given to a master plan, so the whole town is a little collection of neighborhoods with pastoral names--homage to the environment that those neighborhoods displaced. So there's no community area, no Main Street. But I do take comfort in the fact that I can walk to the Catholic Church, post office, drug store, convenience store, Indian take-out place and Asian supermarket. What else do I need from a town?

    Then there are the urban centers.. and they have their problems, too. While concentrating resources in a small area is efficient, it saps resources from the surrounding areas. The aqueduct for New York City comes from upstate New York. The Port Authority in New Jersey is like Manhattan's storage locker. Derrick Jenssen opened my eyes to the exploitative nature of cities. I never really thought about that before, but of course you can't pile 8 million people on top of each other in 25 square miles and provide them with everything they need.

    Then there are the rural areas. Kids are not going to stay there. Family farms are dying. No resources are going to those areas. Kids in many rural areas are dying of heroin overdoses. My DIL came from a rural area in VT. While I perceived that she must have had a wonderful childhood, she reports that it was a bit isolating, especially in the winter. Her two siblings were her best friends. She told me that she is envious of the life my son, her husband had--knowing neighbors across the street and having that sense of close community.

    As far as allocation of resources go, I see your point. I've never thought about how money is dispersed when it comes to population centers, whether they're large or small. What would happen if towns and cities had to be self-sustaining? Like you, I don't worry about that at all. My area is also very much a growth area. And if the infrastructure is here to stay, which is what the author of the article said, how do we adapt to the ebbs of so many of our towns and cities on life support? Do we just accept ghost-town main streets, letting the tumbleweed take over? That's a picture I have in my mind of what I saw when I drove through Hope, Arkansas on a road trip with my daughter. It was weird, and sad.

    It is interesting stuff.
    "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?" Emily Webb, Our Town
    www.silententry.wordpress.com

  7. #7
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    catherine, I can only recommend pouring a few cups of coffee and reading more! lol I've spent several hours over the past few days reading SG. I keep getting suckered in to reading "just one more post".

    I think the blog author is very careful to avoid recommending a One True Way To Live. As I interpret it, "Johnny's" main argument appears to be that many of the choices we (collectively) have made in building our environment have been made without regard to the costs (financial or human), that the bills for those choices are coming due, and that we cannot resolve these problems with the same thinking that got us here -- at the same time we disregard our history as people who've gotten this far.

    I also think the blog appeals to me because it includes discussion of concepts I value, like designing land use for humans; honoring the environment and history; and being responsible for decisions made (good or bad). The author offers many illustrations of cities which try to replicate a Main Street with shopping centers and then don't understand why people don't cross multiple-lane freeways and acres of asphalt to get to stores/restaurants/movies. He takes to task places like Henderson, Nevada, for discounting what it took to irrigate the desert at the expense of creating a viable community with roots. He's written blog entries about cities and towns making very different decisions on how to spend money when the money comes out of private versus public pockets.

    Again, it's not a particular stance on government. Or critiques of urban versus suburban versus rural. It is, primarily, a stance based on common sense.

    As you point out, urban centers typically are not fully self-sufficient. On the other hand, does it make sense to spend massive amounts of money protecting southern Florida from increasingly violent weather and rising sea water levels (is that a battle that can be won)? When did suburban residents at the edges of metropolitan areas start expecting urban-area levels of amenities and public services without covering the extra costs of providing them in thinly-settled areas far from the urban center? Why are governments so unwilling to change policies regarding land use (density, mixes of residential and commercial, structural regulations) when it is pretty clear that those policies have landed them ... here? At what point do some other major urban areas meet their "Detroit" moment and decide that real physical contraction is a more sensible choice than continued attempts to increase taxation or nibble away at public services -- even if it leaves areas of city blocks leveled until there is a demand for higher users?

    I've just found the entire blog -- and the questions it raises -- fascinating.
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

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