Reflection on Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck

              Suburban Nation is a fantastic book and I am turning into a really big fan of Jeff Speck. IT is incredible to me how the smallest choices made in planning regulations can have such big impacts on the way we live. Speck, Plater-Zyberk, and Duany make excellent points in this book about how to stop suburban sprawl and recreate traditional neighborhoods. They are extremely credible and they put their money where there mouth is, designing many different towns and additions to towns up to 2003, when the book was published.

              Sprawl has caused a lot of problems for our country, significantly damaging our public spaces. Before 1950, new roads increased investment and property values nearby, but since 1950, the opposite occurs. The causes are many, but the biggest culprit seems to be the separation of land uses. Building a place with one area for residences, another for commerce, another for schools, and another for some other use is incredibly inefficient for living. It is, however, very efficient for a lazy designer. The result is all of the traffic taking place on a few collector roads and everyone being stranded without a car.

              One of the biggest obstacles in the way of better urban planning is that almost all planning occurs at the municipal level and therefore cannot take regional, state, or federal concerns into account. A loud group of privileged residents can often block development near them and push it into an area of less powerful people. Luckily for South Florida, we have a regional planning authority, the South Florida Water Management District. We should probably put it to work and give it the power to do more planning in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade.

              Another major solution that the authors propose is the total overhaul of planning regulations. Regulations should have diagrams and pictures and an overall vision for what cities and neighborhoods should look like, whereas they currently just list pages and pages of rules prohibiting certain things that are perceived (often incorrectly) to be ugly or unsafe. An additional benefit is that this would do “pre-planning,” allowing developers to know exactly what they can build and where they can build it, which would save would-be investors tons of time. This sort of thing is already in place in Providence, Rhode Island and West Palm Beach, Florida.

              I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in public life at all. I feel like it would be incredibly interesting to any American because we are all affected by the suburban style of living, even if we live in urban or rural areas. The writing is great and every chapter has some new, revelatory passage. The authors end with a simple call for more neighborhoods, defined as cohesive, mixed-use, walkable areas, saying:

              No more housing subdivisions!
              No more shopping centers!
              No more office parks!
              No more highways!
              Neighborhoods or nothing!

• Miscellaneous Facts:
• Spending on transit creates twice as many jobs as highway spending.
• Houston provides 30 asphalt parking spaces per resident.
• New “anchor” businesses, like sports stadiums, should be build with parking at least a block away so that other businesses can locate themselves nearby and benefit from the anchor.
• A structured, multi-tier parking lot costs $12,000 per place versus $1,500 in a surface lot.

Reflection on The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

Do white and black Americans live apart for reasons of personal preference or because of the actions of the government? This important question is the point in dispute between Chief Justice John Roberts, who argues the first and author Richard Rothstein, who argues the latter. Rothstein convincingly shows how the government has intervened time and time again in favor of segregation, which implies that to right this wrong, the government should intervene in favor of integration now, something the Chief Justice has argued is unnecessary because the government was not responsible for housing segregation in the first place.

A major source of federal support for segregation was the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The FHA offered cheap loans to Americans that made it possible for all to own a home… except for black Americans, who were not served by the FHA. This locked black people in America out of one of the biggest wealth-building policies in American history, setting the entire race back by generations. Those homes gathered massive passive income and wealth for the families who had them and many are still in the same families as the original owners. The FHA even judges it too risky to insure racially mixed neighborhoods, forcing whites away from blacks. The US Commission on Civil Rights concluded in 1973 that the, “housing industry, aided and abetted by Government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing… Government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation.”

In the last 50 years, it has not been possible for most places to discriminate explicitly based on race, yet the standard necessary to prove that someone is doing so is extremely high and difficult to meet. Lawyers are usually unable to prove discrimination unless they can more or less record the defendant saying that they discriminated based on race. Rothstein illustrates this though a story of two communities, one black and one white, in the 1990s. When Warren County attempted to build a waste disposal facility in a white area, the residents protested and kept it out. But when they tried to build in a black area that already had three waste disposal facilities, they overruled protests by black residents. A federal judge ruled this legal because there was no explicit discrimination.

Chapter nine of this book is particularly atrocious in the behavior of whites described. It talks about the mobs that formed to eject black people from white neighborhoods they moved into, and those mobs were violent. They used dynamite, cross burnings, and drive-by shootings to terrorize their black neighbors. Worse, the police who arrived at these horrible scenes did not stop them or do anything to inhibit the violence present, instead organizing the mobs and otherwise protecting the violent whites, not the poor black families who just wanted to live.

I just want to quote a few pages from the epilogue of the book here, since they’re excellent in summarizing the point of the book:

“If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs.

If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee.

If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits.

If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so.

If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity.

If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother.

If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods.

If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children.

If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location.

If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere.

If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished.

If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities.”

• Miscellaneous Facts:
• Housing discrimination on the explicit basis of race was illegal starting in 1866 though it was without any method of enforcement and continued unabated until 1968.
• Until the New Deal, home ownership often required 50% down and full repayment after 5-7 years.
• In 1976, the IRS denied the tax exemption of Bob Jones University because the university prohibited interracial dating. The case went before the Supreme Court and Reagan’s administration REFUSED TO EVEN PRESENT THE CASE! The Supreme Court had to APPOINT AN OUSTIDE LAWYER to present the case, and that lawyer won. Incredibly fucked up.
• In 2015, NYC’s sheet metal workers union paid out 13 million dollars for racial discrimination in job assignments.

Reflection on Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft

              Lundy Bancroft is an author and a counselor specializing in relationships of abuse, generally when a male partner is abusive of a female partner. I didn’t realize until I finished a book and researched the author that Lundy is a man. Bancroft has decades of experience working with abusive men and their victims, writing books, and giving speeches across the country. He is definitely a major expert in his field, and he dispels tons of myths in this book. I love that he includes and references tons more resources in his book that are written by others. He is clearly out here to help survivors of abuse any way he can. One crucial point that Bancroft makes early on is that abuse is not always or even mostly physical. Abuse can take spoken form in emotional manipulation and the men that use their words to hurt their partners are still abusive even if they never lay a hand on them.

              Bancroft spends a lot of time analyzing the mind of the abuser. He tells us that abusers want to be a mystery. An abuser seeks to make others think that his behavior makes no sense and have them focus on his feelings rather than his thoughts. An abuser would prefer that his partner think of him as having “anger issues” or a mental illness rather than having his partner understand how he thinks about his actions. An abuser wants his partner to focus on his feelings when it is his thoughts (in which he justifies his manipulation) that are the problem. Bancroft states it very well when he says that, “Abuse grows from attitudes and values, not feelings. The roots are ownership, the trunk is entitlement, and the branches are control.”

              I think that you could criticize Bancroft a little bit for focusing so much on male-on-female abuse and not covering female-on-male abuse. He does address gay and lesbian relationships. However, I am pretty convinced by his points about female-on-male abuse being extremely uncommon. While it makes sense as a reader to hear so much about one and immediately think about abuse going the other way, the fact is that abuse is not divided evenly on gender and that men commit a disproportionate amount of abuse while women receive a disproportionate amount of abuse. For this reason, Bancroft says that “A genuine male victim tends to feel sympathy for abused women and support their cause. The Victim (referring to a male abuser who likes to play the victim), on the other hand, often says that women exaggerate or fabricate their claims of abuse or insists that men are abused just as much as women are.”

              In another interesting passage, the author points out that, “Many of my clients are skilled spin doctors…” and that they use their abilities to manipulate the entire family to get the children on their side. Bancroft puts forward a hypothetical argument in which the children are present but don’t understand the issue at stake. They just see their parents yelling at each other. Bancroft says that in his experience, “An abuser can naturally snap out of the bad effects of an abusive incident much more quickly than the abused woman can.” What tends to happen is that the mother spends the rest of the day distant and depressed while the father disappears for two hours and returns in a good mood, joking and laughing with the children. First of all, this reveals that the mother is probably the victim here since she was obviously impacted more by what happened. Second, who do you think the children want to be with afterwards? Probably not their mother, who’s in a bad mood. This is a classic manipulative tactic that abusive husbands use to bring children onto their side and further isolate their partners.

              Bancroft closes the book by reflecting on how to know if an abuser is really changing. This is incredibly difficult and he points out that his abused partner is the person in the best position to analyze his behavior, not a psychologist or anyone else. This is because abusers tend to be expert manipulators, especially in couples’ therapy, which tends to focus on how both partners can improve their behavior. As such, couples’ therapy does not work in a situation where one partner is causing the problems. In those cases, it can make things worse as it teaches the abuser new vocabulary to use for manipulation and can make him feel even more justified in his actions. Truly repentant abusers will not focus on their partner’s behavior and will express empathy towards their partner. A truly repentant abuser will not feel the need to control their partner’s emotions and will understand their partner’s justified anger towards them for what they had done. Non-repentant abusers will say things like “I can only change if you change too,” and “you need to help me,” or “you don’t realize how much I’ve changed.”

              Bancroft says that the answer is not therapy for the abuser, because therapy “focuses on the man’s feelings and gives him empathy and support.” The answer is an abuser program like Bancroft’s, which can impose rules and consequences on abusers and which is in contact with his victims to get a better understanding of how he acts outside of the program. Bancroft tells countless stories in the book of men who appeared excellent in the program but whose wives and girlfriends told a very different story over the phone. Ultimately, writes the author, “The first test of the quality of an abuser program is whether the main goal of the staff members appears to be helping you or helping him. In a responsible program the abused woman is considered the primary client. The only “assistance” they should be offering to the man is to educate and challenge him about his abusive attitudes and behaviors.”

              I would highly recommend this book because many of us experience abuse or manipulation in our lives even if we don’t want to categorize the person who does it as an “abuser.” Bancroft cautions the reader that the answer is not always cutting contact with that person. He writes that, “One of the biggest mistakes made by people who wish to help an abused woman is to measure success by whether or not she leaves her abusive partner. If the woman feels unable or unready to end her relationship, or if she goes back to him, people who have attempted to help tend to feel that their effort failed and often channel this frustration into blaming the abused woman. A better measure of success for the person helping is how well you have respected the woman’s right to run her own life—which an abusive man does not do—and how well you have helped her to think of strategies to increase her safety. If you stay focused on these goals you will feel less frustrated as a helper and will be a more valuable resource for the woman.” This is an important book and has had a huge impact on the way I view a lot of relationships. I can’t recommend it enough.

Reflection on Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin

              This is a cool book that is comprised of four mini-biographies of the presidents Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and (Lyndon) Johnson. There are three parts, in which the author explores the rise of each figure, a setback in his life, and his leadership in the presidency. A final chapter addresses the last days of each president. I think this book is a great way to learn the lives of each president as well as their leadership styles, but it is more biography than self-help or advice. While Goodwin does mark important lessons to be learned, it would be nice to have more coherent lists of them, rather than being dispersed throughout each chapter. That said, this is an excellent book and I learned a lot about each man profiled. I gathered certain images of each president. Lincoln was completely self-made and self-taught, and cursed with a strong body that made his father take him out of school to work the fields. TR, on the other hand, was cultivated intellectually from a young age but cursed with a weak body that he had to overcome and strengthen. FDR was raised in a similar way and like LBJ was not an intellectual like Lincoln or Teddy. He instead had what Oliver Wendell Holmes called “A second-class intellect. But a firs class temperament.” FDR was smooth, confident, and likeable. He was able to make hard decisions based on good advice and didn’t need the wits of someone like Lincoln, who pored over books in every spare moment. Johnson, like Lincoln, grew up poor. He worked the hardest and most obsessively of all of them and was a true visionary. It’s interesting that each man looked to his predecessors for lessons and learned from those who came before.

Reflection on Dune by Frank Herbert

              Since this is just a novel I don’t plan to produce a seriously big reflection. I just wanna say that I read this book and it was great. I found it very engaging and honestly crazy. I am excited to see the movie later this year though I doubt they can recreate all of the third-person omniscient thoughts that Herbert gives the audience. I didn’t know that this book was so based on middle-eastern culture.

Reflection on Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

               This book left me feeling sad in a way that not a lot of these books do. I remember reading the Jefferson biography a year or so ago and having a similar feeling, which I think means that the writer did a very good job with the death of their subject. In Disney’s case, it left me especially sad being that he died of lung cancer and very fearful of death. He was always seeking perfection and never really was satisfied with anything he did, which must have left him feeling incomplete. That sort of attitude drove him forward, but it also must have made him feel like his life was so unfinished at his death as he was obsessing over EPCOT.

               Walt had a really good and a really bad childhood. The really good part was in the small town of Marceline, Missouri, where his father Elias was a farmer. However, the really bad part was when the family moved to St. Louis after the farm didn’t work out. Walt hated the city and was forced to work constantly and missed out on a lot of childhood activities that he had in Marceline. Walt’s father Elias was stern and sometimes violent, leading to an incident when he went to beat Walt with a hammer and Walt stopped and disarmed him at 14 years old. After working with the Red Cross in World War One, Walt moved to LA to follow his artistic dreams. Though his first business, Laugh-O-Gram (which produced short cartoons before movies), went bankrupt, Walt wasn’t bitter and continued to work hard.

               With Laugh-O-Gram, Disney had a successful character in Oswald the Rabbit, but lost the rights to him in the bankruptcy. It was then that he created Mickey Mouse. Originally, he was to be called Mortimer Mouse, but Walt’s wife Lillian made him change the name. Mickey defeated his rival, Felix the Cat because Mickey’s shorts contained sound, a major innovation. Not only did they have sound, but they were created with sound in mind so that the action matched up. Felix the Cat’s creator, however, only added the sound in afterwards, a sort of halfhearted attempt to compete with Mickey.

               When the Depression came, Walt and his older brother Roy, who managed the finances, were in a very good position. They had not invested in the markets, rather putting all the money from their business back into their business. You could say that the Depression saved the Disney company since they ended up with a lot of money when nobody else had any. It led to the best talent moving into Disney Studios. In the thirties, Disney’s new innovation was color cartoons, and when Snow White premiered in color it was a sensation, earning $6.7 million, the most of any film to that point.

               One May 29, 1941, Disney’s workers went on strike, a very controversial event that split the studio. At a time of unionization all across the country, the AFL put Disney products on its “unfair” list and that meant that no Disney movies could be shown since the soundmen were unionized. The lab technicians at Technicolor wouldn’t even process Disney film. Walt meanwhile blamed the strike on Communist infiltrators. The strike ended on July 30 with ten percent wage increases for artists earning under $50 a week, backpay and reinstatement of strikers and fired workers, and for future layoffs to be decided by a joint committee of management and workers. The strike marked the end of the carefree days at Disney studios when Walt was just one of the guys. Walt started to get meaner and became a fearsome presence in Disney offices. At the same time, Disney started to face greater competition from Hannah-Barbera and Looney Tunes.

               I think the author protests too much when discussing Disney’s racism and anti-Semitism. While it seems like Walt was not a virulent, hateful racist, it is clear that he harbored prejudices, even if they were not much more than most other powerful white men at the time. I think that Gabler overdoes it when he tries to defend Disney’s statements. I also wish that Gabler had spent more time on the Disney World park, since that was a major reason that I picked up the book, but I guess that was a project that was not occupying most of Walt’s time at his death. I enjoyed this book and found the subject to be a very interesting guy.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Walt Disney was not frozen, but cremated.
• By the end of the 30’s, Disney Studios had a row of filing cabinets with 1.5 million jokes grouped under 124 classifications.
• Walt bought a house for his parents in California and sent one of his men to fix the heating system there. Tragically, the handyman made some sort of mistake and created a carbon monoxide leak that rendered his father unconscious and killed his mother. The guilt must have been terrible.
• Disneyland was built with a railroad at 5/8 scale. The buildings are built with the first floor at 9/10 scale, the second floors 8/10, and the third floors 7/10. Other parts were also built at different scales to emphasize and deemphasize certain parts of the park.
• Disney World was built in Orlando so that it wouldn’t have to compete with the gulf or ocean coasts.

Reflection on How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Maine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918 by Heather Venable

               This is another book about the Marines that I’m reading for obvious reasons. This book, which was excellent, focused on an early time in the history of the Marines and their crucial public relations transition into “the first to fight.” The book convers the transition in which Marines stopped calling themselves soldiers and started to call themselves just Marines. In the 19^th century, Marines served onboard ships as sharpshooters and boarders of enemy ships as well as military police to prevent mutinies. But as the Navy developed further, there was less need for Marines except for as secondary gunners on large steel ships, which created conflict with sailors who felt that the big guns were their purview.

               The Marines created their myth before it became a reality. Marine recruiters made exaggerated claims in newspapers about being the oldest service and that the young American republic depended on (as quoted in newspapers) a “faithful cops [that] was its only defense.” Prior to this, Marines had a bad reputation on ships for refusing to do menial tasks that they considered to be part of the Navy’s job. Later on, at the beginning of the 20^th century, they adopted a can-do attitude, claiming that they could and would do any job. However, President Theodore Roosevelt removed Marines from ships in 1908. But by that time, the Marines had already found a new purpose as an expeditionary force in the Spanish-American War. Around the same time, the Marine Corps song, “The Halls of Montezuma,” became referred to as a hymn, suggesting a deeper meaning. All this pride became a part of the Marine Corps’ personality by World War One and future Marines would enter the Corps believing whole-heartedly in their masculinity, toughness, and superiority over other branches of the military.

               Venable tells a story of a World War One-era Marine, who was sleeping in a cot. Some visitor remarked to another, “I think this must be an American soldier.” Venable writes that, “From the depths of the pillow came a muffled voice— ‘Hell no; I’m a Marine!’”