Mary

--> Mary

02/24/2018

After work yesterday evening Angela and I were taking a short walk in our neighborhood. After two blocks we saw an elderly woman, probably in her early 80s, attempting to cross the street perpendicular to our direction. She was having a difficult time stepping off the curb with her walker and instinctively we crossed the street to help her.

Mary (her name written on a strip of paper taped to her walker) was wearing pajama bottoms, a tee shirt, sneakers, and a long but thin sweater. Although it was still sunny, the temperature was in the low to mid 50s and there was a little wind blowing which made it feel cooler. I commented on how lightly she was dressed for such a cold day and she mentioned that she didn’t need to go too far, “just down the block”. Mary walked with some difficulty so we asked if we could walk with her to make sure she arrived safely. She was very thankful and accepted, but when we asked what her address was she said she didn’t remember, only that her house was yellow. What street was it on, I asked. She didn’t remember that either but said that if we walked far enough she’d know it when we got there.

But one more block was the end of the street, and we pointed that out to her. She was a bit confused and was getting agitated. “What street are we on?”, “What city is this?” She asked. My answers only seemed to confound her more. We asked her if there was someone we could call for her, but Mary didn’t remember any phone numbers. Or names. Or how far she’d walked that afternoon. She was weak and tired and thirsty. “Maybe it’s a good time to call the police” she said, but I was already dialing. As I stepped away to talk to the operator I over heard her say “I don’t want to go back to the nursing home” to Angela.

While dispatch put me on hold I knocked on a neighbor’s door and asked permission to have Mary sit on a chair in their porch. Instead they kindly let her in the house, helped her sit on the sofa, and gave her water and a warm blanket while waiting for the police to arrive. I had to leave but the owner of the house told me not to worry, that she’d make sure Mary was in good hands.

If, as Mahatma Ghandi said, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members”, then we are pitifully inferior. We don’t provide adequate housing, medical care, and social services the elderly need for their survival let alone for a dignified retirement. We warehouse them in god-awful places where all they do is sit, hoping death comes quickly; or worse, we put them out into the street to fend for themselves.

Meanwhile, the government is itching to privatize (i.e. pillage) what’s left of Social Security, the insurance companies and their cronies in government fight tooth-and-nail to prevent a single-payer healthcare system and destroy what’s left of the Affordable Care Act, the pharmaceutical companies take every opportunity to raise prices as high as the market will bear. In short, a concerted effort to pry the last dime off the hands of the elderly, the sick, the disabled, the poor, the veterans, the mentally ill.

What a shame, on all of us!

Carlos Ovalle

Gentrificación - Chusmatizacion

Hoy durante la cena Angela y yo hablábamos acerca del termino "gentrification" y tratábamos de encontrar una traducción correcta al español. Al no conseguirlo buscamos en el internet y descubrimos que se dice "gentrificación", un neologismo. Existen otras traducciones que se han considerado o utilizado pero sin ser tan apropiados como gentrificación, tal como elitización, la cual nos gusto a ambos.

Luego de leer, en español, un resumen del termino, Angela comento que la inversa había pasado en nuestro vecindario cuando compramos nuestra casa. En ese entonces estábamos rodeados principalmente de gente de raza blanca y de mayores ingresos. Nosotros logramos comprar la casa debido a que había estado abandonada por mas de un año y estaba en condiciones de ruina. De no ser así no hubiésemos podido. Pero, al mudarnos, el vecino mas antagonista y racista le comento a los otros vecinos, "when those Mexicans move in, there goes the neighborhood" (cuando se mudan aquí esos Mexicanos se arruina el vecindario).  Entonces, pregunto Angela, ¿cual es el antónimo de gentrificación? Chusmatizacion, conteste yo.

Thoughts on the California drought emergency.

I belong to the American Water Works Association online group in which I am an active participant. In response to a current hot issue, the severe drought in California, I posted something about global climate change having an impact on the drought. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, but not to others. One response was "the issue here was "Water emergency in California due to record drought." 
Why are you discussing global warming?." My response follows:

It is disingenuous to address the issue of drought in California without addressing everything that impacts the drought, and without addressing the entire region's drought crisis. Nothing exists in isolation. The drought is not just an issue of lack of water, it's also about politics, money, and climate change. 

Certainly, as mentioned before, long-ago deceased political and financial wheeler-dealers were a factor in creating the mess we're in. To my knowledge no one here disagrees with that. However, politicians being what they are, they continue to cater to the whims of the business sector (agribusiness, sprawling home developments), common sense not withstanding. Hence the recent back room deals that allow almond and pistachio farmers (big business really) to have a permanent water supply, whereas vegetable farmers do not. Guess what, money crops win and politician's pockets are lined. Such is the state of affairs in this state, and without hesitation I can tell you that it's the status quo in every state of the union. Here it's water, there it's coal, over there it's oil. It's always something, and the crisis du jour happens to be the drought in the southwest. 

Conservation costs money. Once upon a time farming was a mom and pop operation with very little mechanization, thus labor intensive. Profits required larger tracts of land, mechanization, fewer laborers, and a larger planting season. The southwest (and that includes other states than CA) proved the ideal conditions for industrial farming. Industrial farming (or agribusiness) carries a lot of weight financially and politically, hence special deals for this kind of business. But folk snowed in elsewhere in our nation enjoy produce grown in CA, hence our plight is not just CA's plight, it's the plight of the nation as a whole. To believe otherwise is not to be in sync with reality. 

What are Californians to say? 'Mea culpa' and thump our chest in repentance for the crimes others in times past? I certainly won't. My family and I have done our utmost to promote responsible development, including water conservation measures that in our area mean essentially that we do not need Mulholland's aqueduct. For now we're essentially isolated because 99% of the folk I speak with immediately accuse me of being everything from a tree-hugging liberal to a Water Nazi. These folk cry about concern of their manicured lawns as a constitutional right akin to the First Amendment. Same thing when I talk to them about prohibiting special water rights to cash crops (almonds, pistachios). Same thing when I tell them farmers are going to have to start paying the real cost of water, which means substantially higher prices at the market because conservation costs money. It's not just politicians who are living from election to election, thus their myopic view of things. It's all of us really, and that includes EVERYONE in the U.S. who enjoys relatively and artificially low priced produce from CA. 

Change requires not just exhuming Mulholland and his ilk (Eaton, Lippincott, et al), and of course Theodore Roosevelt, and whipping them back to hell for their sins, but also every politician from the 1890s to this very day. More importantly, it means reeducating everyone so that this sh*t isn't allowed to happen again. Wishful thinking on my part, I know. So what will happen in reality? Some dumb politician of whatever inclination is blamed, his butt is thrown out of office and a new one takes his place. And the cycle starts all over again. Without a quantum leap in understanding that everything is interrelated (politics, money, climate change, globalization) all we will do is jump from one scapegoat to another.

It's been over a year since the last post, lots has happened in that time, I will post an update on what has transpired towards the end of April. In the meantime, a link related to the theme of Smart Apartments:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZSdrtEqcHU&feature=player_embedded

llamarada de tusas - rebuilding Haiti

There is a saying in Spanish, "llamarada de tusas" (corn husk flame), which alludes to the initial hype... and then we forget.

What worries me most is that there is always a flurry of activity, ideas, money, etc. during a short period of time after a catastrophic event such as with Haiti. The long term consequence of all our well-intentioned albeit short-sighted help is that Haiti will be left with nothing to show except millions of empty plastic water bottles and not much else. Eventually reconstruction will happen, as it always happens in these cases, in anarchist fashion. The debris from the quake will be cleaned up a little, the bricks or concrete blocks trimmed of excess grout and reused with nary a piece of reinforcing steel, the foundation will be the ground trampled under foot, the sewers will be open trenches on the street. History repeats itself. I assure you however, that the national palace and the cathedral will be rebuilt stronger, and likely grander, than before.

All that said, there is a ray of hope with organizations like Architecture for Humanity. Rebuilding Port-au-Price will require a concerted effort that will pay significant attention to a sustainable infrastructure. It's not as glamorous as say, carting a bunch of FEMA trailers and setting them up on blocks as some have suggested in other venues. More importantly, rebuilding will require local participation; we must not, under any circumstances, foster the paternalistic tradition of giving handouts. Public participation is essential at all levels. Not just in regards to the urban planning aspects but also in the creation of cooperatives and micro-enterprises for the actual rebuilding. In the end, it will give Hatians a sense of ownership and the result will be the rebuilding not just of the city, but of the spirit.

Poetry by Pablo Neruda - standard oil co.

The big green picture

I had lunch the other day with a friend and a good part of the conversation centered around urban planning, European city design, Los Angeles, public transportation, the L.A. River, urban infill, and other such issues. When I got back to the office I started a LEED checklist for a new project for which the owner intends to achieve Gold certification. While doing this I started to think again about my Smart Apartments idea and it occurred to me that perhaps a Smart Apartment built without any appreciable change in the standard building practice might have a smaller carbon footprint than a large home built with the latest in 'green' technology, perhaps even if this large home has a LEED certification.

How do we, in the U.S., look at sustainability? I suspect that in many ways we see it as some kind of redemption for our conspicuous consumption. Do we feel much better living in a MacMansion because it is  certified by LEED or any other 'green' entity? Of course, but we haven't made the quantum leap away from conspicuous consumption, we've only sugar-coated it. My next task is to investigate, at least at a conceptual level, what impact does it have on the carbon footprint to reduce the size of a home or office by 10% using standard construction practices Vs. a space with the same programmatic requirements but with a LEED rating. What impact does a smaller car with a standard combustion engine Vs. a hybrid SUV? On a grander scale, what impact on the environment does a compact and efficient city have Vs. a series of independent green developments?