More Books in the House

The Christmas wrapping is in the compost and the presents are now in a stack next to my bed.  They are almost all books, added to the hundred or so others piled up between my side of the bed and the window.  I've been home from work for a couple of days, and during this time have acquired even more.  I went to a book store on Wednesday, looking for a copy of "Love in the Time of Cholera" for a book club that I may or may not make it to, but they didn't have it in stock so I got it nearly instantly downloaded to my Kindle instead (when two day delivery is not fast enough).  Others have come up in other discussions for another book club, another I heard about from a New Yorker article, and I ordered all of them.

We were walking the dog the other day and I asked whichever children were accompanying me (it's not that I have that many, but they are all at home at the moment) how many books they thought we have in our house.  Sarah estimated ten thousand, which seemed to me to be a reasonable guess - almost every room has bookcases, and they are insufficient to hold all the books, which are also in boxes and stacks and spread across the floor where stacks collapsed.  When Caroline was in kindergarten, she was recruited to participate in the kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a U.S. Department of Education-sponsored study that included periodic in person assessments, teacher questionnaires, and telephone interviews of parents.  One question they always asked me was how many children's books we had in our home; I remember estimating eight hundred the first time I was asked and two thousand years later -- the interviewers always seemed surprised; not skeptical, just surprised.

Most of those have been cleared out now - they went to neighbors, to neighborhood preschools and to Morningside Elementary and to book drives for other schools and maybe some of them to Goodwill -- but we all are accumulators of books, and the result is apparent in almost every room.  I have been thinking about this recently not because I am concerned about the clutter (which I should be more than I am) but because I now know that it is hopeless that I will every get everything read that I intend to read.

Years ago (I don't even remember when) I used to keep track of the books I read on 3 by 5 inch index cards.  After that there was a notebook; I don't know what happened to either that or the 3 by 5 cards.  Then there was nothing for a long time (which may have had something to do with having children) and then there was Goodreads.  I liked being able to easily add a book to the list of books I want to read, and then move them, one at a time, from "Want to Read" to "Currently Reading" to "Read." And then there are the reading challenges, setting goals for how many books you plan to read, and periodically checking how you're doing.  One recent year I set a goal of fifty, and came no where near it.  This year's goal was 26, but I have been reading more (I have periodically sworn off watching television news, this year, and have consciously tried to read instead) and I am now at forty books read in 2017, and may finish that book on the Kindle by the end of the year (or not).

But here's the calculation I just did.  Let's say, for purposes of discussion, that I have another thirty years of reading ahead of me (which would get me to an age older than both of my long-lived parents) - and I managed to read an average of fifty books a year for those thirty years.  That is only fifteen hundred books, for the rest of my life - and I just got eleven books for Christmas (okay, so one was a book on hydroponic gardening that is more of a reference book and probably won't be read cover-to-cover) and since Christmas I've bought five more, including the one I am currently reading on my Kindle.

I really am fine with getting rid of most of them, after I've read them - I regularly pass them along to someone else, or leave them in a neighborhood Little Free Library, or drop them off in a Better World Books donation box.  Our house is not full to the rafters with books we've read (although some of them we have) but with books we mean to read.  So I guess this means I should stop writing, right now, and start reading - because I can't really do too much about the thirty years, at this point, but maybe I can increase the fifty.  Fifteen hundred is just not a big enough number.

Good Neighbors

I haven't written much here this year in part because for the last several months I have mostly been out of town for work.  During the time I was gone, I lived in a short term rental, furnished apartment in a building where I did not know a single person.  There were other people living there for sure -- I saw their Amazon packages, piled up in the corridor -- but I rarely saw anyone.  It's not that the neighborhood wasn't a "real neighborhood" -- on Halloween, there was a huge neighborhood festival and entire families in costume out trick-or-treating in the early evening, and occupants of single family homes were set up in the front yard in costume with vats of candy to hand out -- but my building, no.

Now I am back, and getting caught up on what's going on here. We have houses under construction on both ends of the street but several houses that were on the market are now under contract (at least according to the signs in the yards).

So we are expecting several new neighbors soon, unless the plan is to knock down the house and start over. 

The moving truck followed by the home theater installation people and Xfinity have been at one house (the "Under Contract" sign has been down there for a while), and there's now a car in the driveway, so we figure we do have new neighbors, but at least as of yesterday, the neighbors on either side of them haven't met them yet.  I will try to get brownies made today and take them over.  Wessyngton women are having our more-or-less annual festive winter seasonal event later this week, and we'll need to make sure to pass along the invitation to that, too.

This is what neighbors are supposed to do -- stop by when new people move in, not with the expectation that we will all end up being best of friends (although of course that might happen), but that if I'm out of town you might be willing to pick up my mail and my newspaper for a couple of days, or help me find my lost dog.  This does not appear to be the norm everywhere, I know - there was the terribly depressing post I saw during the summer, written by an elderly lady in Southern California who tried hard to get to know her neighbors, but no one reciprocated, (and no, I don't usually read The Federalist - I don't even remember how I came across this) and there are the regular reports that fewer people know their neighbors now than in the past.  (And of course, sometimes it just doesn't work because some people are terrible people.)  That's not our local ecology, here, but I know it is that way in many neighborhoods.  A lot of us here try hard to be good neighbors.

When I was in the apartment, there was an electronic lock on my door that didn't require a key.  One time when I was on an early morning flight back to Atlanta I realized after I got to the airport that I hadn't locked the door when I left.  The normal thing would be to ask a neighbor to lock it, but I did not know one person in the building - so I had to ask the property management company to send someone by to lock the door. 

But I have to go now.  I need to make some brownies.

The Neighborhoods We Want (Business Edition, Part 2)

I haven't posted in a long time - there are several half-written posts in my head, but none of them ever got to keyboard (there's been a lot going on).  But I have to get this post written because there's another round of discussion on Nextdoor about local businesses closing.  The spice store in Virginia Highland closed - I loved the spice store, but it's gone.  On Nextdoor, it's pretty much the same discussion as last time, about rents and foot traffic and competition from cooler commercial areas like Ponce City Market or Krog Street Market and paid parking and what kinds of retail and restaurants used to be in the neighborhood as opposed to what's there now.

It's not that it's a great time for retail generally.  A couple days ago NBC News reported that over a thousand stores closed in a recent week, and more than 100,000 retail workers have lost their jobs since October 2016.  Retail space is overbuilt, and that, along with online buying and other changes in taste and habit (malls stopped being cool decades ago) have decimated shopping malls.

But our neighborhood commercial areas aren't enclosed malls or strip malls - they are appealing, and walkable, and in well-established neighborhoods with substantial buying power.  In spite of that, though, businesses struggle and the latest round of closings in Virginia Highland has reignited the discussion about what's going on.  In our small commercial area in Morningside, it seems that vacancies linger longer than they do in Virginia Highland, where hope springs eternal and retailers keep trying.  There's a "Coming Soon" sign up where Half-Moon Outfitters was and another empty location also will reopen sometime before too long as something else.  But if rents are so high that the businesses the neighborhood actually can and will support can't survive, and there aren't enough destination shops to fill the spaces, at some point, places stay vacant, because once rents go up, they don't go down.

There was an article in the New York Times last week about what happened to a small retail area on Bleecker Street in West Village in New York City.  There used to be neighborhood businesses like bodegas and laundromats and hardware stores, but then the high-end stores came in, and the neighborhood was briefly full of high-priced designer shops.  Then the designer stores failed (they didn't get much business), and now the rents are too high for anything else and the storefronts are vacant.

"If many of the high-end stores along Bleecker didn’t prosper as businesses, 'they succeeded in transforming the area into a luxury retail neighborhood that feeds on itself,' said Jeremiah Moss, who has tracked the city’s ever-changing streetscape on his blog, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, since 2007.

"Bleecker Street, Mr. Moss said, is a prime example of high-rent blight, a symptom of late-stage gentrification. 'These stores open as billboards for the brand,' he said. 'Then they leave because the rents become untenable. Landlords hold out. And you’re left with storefronts that will sit vacant for a year, two years, three years.'"

 Here are the last several paragraphs of the article:

"Elad Yifrach, the founder and creative director of L’Objet, an upscale décor brand that opened its first New York store last fall in one of the former Coach outposts, believes the area still has retail magic, despite the recent hard times.

“'Bleecker is quintessential West Village,' he said. 'The most beautiful townhouses are around there. The street needs to go back to bringing a cool factor, things that will inspire the audience.'

"For many longtime Village residents, what the street is missing is not a cool factor but the essential mix of businesses that makes a neighborhood function. On a recent afternoon, Marjorie Reitman, who has lived in the Village for 43 years and who was out on Bleecker Street walking her neighbor’s dog, Walter, reflected on the street’s mercantile past.

“'I remember when I first moved down here,' she said. 'There was a hardware store owned by an elderly couple, a grocery store, a newspaper store.'

"She was standing in front of ATM Anthony Thomas Melillo, a clothing boutique that opened in February to sell $115 'destroyed wash' T-shirts and other garments. The store had no customers, and the front door was open, allowing the air-conditioning to pump out into the street, something Ms. Reitman lectured the young sales associates about.
'That’s the attitude: "I have money, I can pay the fine, I don’t care,"' Ms. Reitman said.

"The original Marc Jacobs store on Bleecker that started the boom was next door with its windows blacked out. Ms. Reitman had an idea for that space and the other empty stores that dot Bleecker Street like missing teeth in a very expensive mouth.

"'They should all be pot shops,' she said. 'Seriously. I’m not kidding. I can’t imagine what else could go in and pay the rent.'"

If it is not possible to make enough to pay the rent, no one will stay in business, and once rents go up, they don't, apparently, go down.  So Caramba is replaced by Burger Tap which is replaced by the waffle sandwich place (okay, so maybe there is a reason other than high rents why some of these places didn't make it) which is replaced by Timone's which is replaced by Timone's which is replaced by Whiskey Bird. I certainly wish the Whiskey Bird folks well, but it they don't make it, it's back to brown paper covering the windows and a "For Lease" sign.

I would like to be optimistic but I'm not.  I don't know if there is any turning the clock back, once you lose the places that make your neighborhood function for the people who live there.  If the business plan requires that lots of people come from outside the neighborhood, then there's the reality of competition from cooler places and traffic and parking -- it might work for Murphy's, but it's hard to see it working for the entire commercial district.  Our neighborhood commercial areas may not be quite at the "high-rent blight" stage, but if it happens, at least now we know what to call it.

 And for all those folks on Nextdoor, we have the answer -- the rents are too high.

The Neighborhoods We Want (Business Edition)

It was in early September that we got the email announcement that Toscano & Sons, the Italian grocery store in Virginia Highland, was closing.  This was a shock.  That was where we bought flour for pizza making in 50 pound bags and cans of Italian tomatoes for pizza sauce.  They had great sandwiches and it was pleasant to sit on the sidewalk with a panini and watch the people go by.  But the rents were high, and ultimately (Tom heard from the owners), it just wasn't worth it -- the landlord was making more than the business owners were.

The closing of Toscano & Sons led to a long and surprisingly lively and constructive discussion on Nextdoor about the difficulties that neighborhood businesses face.  My response when my favorite places close is blame the landlords for rents that are too high, which may or may not be fair; there was discussion in the Nextdoor thread about whether or not Virginia Highland is still a shopping and dining destination for people from outside the neighborhood, with competition from other commercial areas, like Ponce City Market and Krog Street Market and Inman Quarter.  There were complaints about Park Atlanta, which is always fair game in my book, but others pointed out that most of us can easily walk or bike there so parking should not really be so much of a deterrent for us in the nearby neighborhoods. There were discussions about the mix of businesses in Virginia Highland, pointing out that there were only so many bars and boutiques the neighborhood could support, and some proposals for what kind of businesses we'd like to see in the neighborhood, with most of the suggestions not sounding very viable to me (a lot of focus on "organic" and "locally sourced" which doesn't go so well with "inexpensive").  There was nostalgia for an independent bookstore that used to be nearby that I don't remember so it probably closed more than 25 years ago.  And some of the local business owners spoke up, and made the case that just a little more business from all of us would make a big difference to them.

There are lots of reasons to support local businesses -- we'd rather do business with people that we know and that know us than with strangers; it's more fun to walk to Morningside Kitchen than to drive to Buckhead (actually, almost anything is more fun than driving to Buckhead); and it would be so depressing if Virginia Highland or Morningside Village got replaced by, say, a Walmart.  Another reason is what the American Independent Business Alliance calls "the local economic multiplier effect" -- what we spend at locally-owned, independent businesses is far more likely to circulate in our community, contributing to the local economy, than what we spend at absentee-owned businesses, locally-owned franchises, or (in the worst possible case) a distant, online retailer.  ("Buying remotely creates almost no local benefit – just a few minutes’ work for a delivery person.”)

We shop at Costco and Target and Amazon, and will continue to, but having Toscano & Sons close and the subsequent conversation about our neighborhood businesses has made me realize that if I love having these businesses nearby, I need to support them better.  And if all of us did that -- just a little more shopping and dining in the neighborhood -- we wouldn't keep having our favorite places closing.

Yesterday, after early voting, we walked to Virginia Highland for breakfast, and I was surprised to see this in the window, where Toscano & Sons used to be:

It looks like we might have another chance at supporting our neighborhood Italian market.  I'll do better this time.

Waiting for the Bus

I've had some time off work recently and have been out and about in the city on MARTA a little more frequently than usual.  There are two bus routes that run on Highland near our street, and between them, you can get to lots of places -- one of them goes to downtown, and another goes to Midtown, and both connect to rail stations so you can get to everywhere the rail system goes, including the airport.  But the buses don't run very frequently -- if it's not rush hour, you're going to wait a long time, and even in rush hour they may still be 25 minutes or longer apart, so for this to not be a complete exercise in frustration, you need to know when the bus is coming so you get there before the bus you want comes, not after.

This is the premise of MARTA Army's Timely Trip project, to post (and keep current) schedules at neighborhood bus stops.  I've signed up for the two closest to my street, and went to the MARTA Army event a couple of weeks ago to get my updated schedules.  We were at the Atlanta City Studio, temporarily located at Ponce City Market.  The Studio is occupied by real city planners from the City of Atlanta, but is open for visitors and hosts events that are open to the public.  This time, the MARTA Army folks proposed that we personalize the schedule, with art or in some other way.

I opted just for a short message in colored pencil, pointing out that if you took MARTA, you wouldn't have to find a place to park:

And here they are, in place:

Now that's all well and good, but for the posted schedules to be helpful, the buses need to run on schedule, and they don't so much. Sometimes there's little traffic and few passengers to stop for, and they run ahead of schedule, or the traffic is terrible and they run late.  Even that wouldn't be a complete deal-breaker if you could find out that your bus is running 10 minutes early or 15 minutes late - you could plan accordingly.  MARTA does have an app with some helpful functions but you still can't really tell from the "real-time map" when your bus is likely to show up.  This is not one of my bus routes (more about that in a minute) but this is what the map looks like:

The map is not continuously updated, and even when the buses appear on the map, sometimes they disappear or just don't move and and it's hard to figure out from this whether it's time to head for the bus stop or not.  That's when they show up on the map in the first place.  This is the current map for Route 16, the bus that goes south on Highland to downtown:

There should be a southbound bus but nothing shows up (it being early Sunday morning as I am writing this, there is not yet a northbound bus running; that's a separate problem.)  Many of the buses don't seem to have location information available, which makes this function not useful.  (I also tried to take a screen shot of the other route on Highland, Route 36, but every time I try to open that map, the app closes, which is another feature which really limits its usefulness.)

I was complaining about this absence of information about when the buses were expected to show up at the very first MARTA Army event I went to, and someone told me that there is an app that provides this information that the MARTA app does not.  One Bus Away takes the location information from MARTA and projects when your bus is expected to show up.  Or at least it used to; more recently it doesn't seem to know where the buses are, and just shows you the scheduled times, which doesn't help:

Advance Atlanta, one of several groups that is working on regional transit issues, is collaborating with Civic Dinners to provide a framework for people who are interested to get together and discuss what are the problems with transit in the Atlanta region and hopefully get more of us to care about the solutions.  You can sign up to host a dinner or find one that someone else has organized and sign up to attend one.  My neighbor Alyssa hosted the first one last week.  This is not quite our entire group -- one person joined us after this was taken -- but we had good representation from the neighborhood, and and there were several people with professional interest in transit issues.  It was a good discussion, and it was interesting for me to hear other perspectives on the issue.

One of the questions we discussed was if we could magically solve one really big, intractable problem, what would it be?  By the time I spoke up, others that already mentioned the big ones -- absence of an integrated regional transit system, fragmented governance across the metro region, and the racism that is so deeply entangled with transit issues in Atlanta -- so I said I just wanted to be able to tell when the bus was going to show up.  Really, I'd take it more often if it wasn't so frustrating.  This should not be so hard.  Just let us know your best estimate of when the bus is going to show up at the bus stop.

In November, we will have a chance to vote on funding for MARTA.  This is a big opportunity, and there are lots of ideas about how those funds should be invested, if the referendum passes.  Citizens for Progressive Transit put together an interactive website where you can put together your own proposal for how to invest the $2.5B or more that the sales tax is expected to raise over the next 40 years.  But before we extend rail or build more streetcar tracks or even buy more buses, we should fix the system we have so that we know when the bus is probably going to show up. Just that one thing.  It should not be that hard.

Still Not Thinking about Selling

They are at it again,  Last week someone from Muffley & /Associates "Land Acquisition Team" left handwritten (but probably not written by the signer) at Lynsley's house and at ours, and I think he also talked to Kathy.  Here is Lynsley's card:

And here's ours:

The text of the two is nearly but not quite identical.  Here is ours:

Dear Neighbor,

I have a lovely young couple who absolutely loves [sic] your street.  They have asked me to reach out to you about your house specifically. They are ready to pay a premium for a special place to call home!  They want to know if you are interested in selling?  Please call me when you recieve [sic] this so we can discuss a price that may interest you!

Thank you, 

Jarrett Reeves [initialed "JR", followed by a phone number]

This is frustrating on so many levels.  There is the fake familiarity of "Dear Neighbor," and the "lovely young couple who absolutely love your street."  There's the implication that this lovely young couple is "specifically" interested in our house (as well as Kathy's and Lynsley's and who knows how many others), no doubt because our houses are so nice -- or maybe because they think they are teardowns, which most of us find pretty offensive.

Of course, if there really was a "lovely young couple" who wanted to live on our street, there's Danielle's house, that's been on the market for a while now.  

There's the lot where the duplex used to be, that is now home to random construction debris and a swamp.  There's the other duplex, on the corner at Cumberland, where a builder got a variance to build "an English country cottage-style home" but nothing has happened yet.  If you're interested, though, here's what they say it will look like, after they cut down the trees and build it:

And most famously, there is the site where the apartments used to be, where the city had to approve building three houses on two lots because they made a mistake on a planning map maybe ten years ago and the property was purchased based on that planning map.  Nothing has happened for years there, except damaging trees and periodic stop work orders because of tree damage and erosion.

Periodically signs for real estate companies or developers appear there, but nothing has happened.  Recently new, very large signs appeared, which may be the harbinger of new, very large houses to follow.  Or maybe not -- we'll see.

So, if there really is a "lovely young couple" who absolutely love our street, they have lots of options.  Those options do not include purchasing and demolishing Lynsley's, Kathy and Steve's, or our houses, though.  The Land Acquisition Team at Muffley and Associates may want to make note of that and save themselves some time.

One Year Later

The small brick duplex that used to be a few houses away from us was demolished a year ago yesterday.  The duplex had not been occupied since November 2013,  It was in the fall of 2014 that several large trees behind the duplex were cut down.  By March 2015 there was a dumpster in the driveway and a "For Sale" sign from Keller Williams and a Black Dawg Construction sign in the front yard.

It was demolished a year ago yesterday, on July 2, 2015.

By the next morning, there was just a pile of debris; in this picture, the trees that were cut down the previous year are still visible behind where the house used to be.

And here it is a couple of days later, after the heavy equipment was gone.

The debris got removed along with the remains of the trees that were cut down, but by fall there was a dumpster, a pile of rocks, and a trailer on the lot.

There also was a puddle at the low point of the back yard that never really went away.

By January 2016, the dumpster was gone, but otherwise nothing much had changed.

By early June, the trailer was gone and the grass and weeds had grown tall.

There still was a puddle in the back, maybe because there was an open drainage pipe.

 

These pictures were taken about two weeks later.  Someone had mowed the weeds, tidied up a little, and put the signs back up, but the rocks were still piled up near the mailbox.

Now, we're a year out from demolishing the house, and the lot is still a mess and there's still mud in the back yard, even though it's been a long time since it rained.

I don't know if or when this will ever get cleaned up, but if I were Black Dawg Construction or Keller Williams, I really wouldn't want to have my sign here.