What the brick--?!?

In honor of “Script Frenzy,” I have written the following short dialogue, which takes place not far from lower slumburbia (southwest Wheaton, in this instance).

Boilerplate Disclaimer:  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.  Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and derives from heretofore untapped psychic powers.

INT. CONSTRUCTION SITE TRAILER - EARLY SPRING, DAYTIME

The contractor, JOE, sits on a broken swivel chair, looking over change order forms and other assorted paperwork.  ELMER, a construction worker, enters the room and stands there until JOE notices him.

ELMER

Boss?  My family is growing very fast and I need more space right now.  I want to ask you--

JOE

--what, buddy?  You lookin’ for another bonus?  Or even more overtime?!  You know, work slowed down a bit in the off-season and I think you should really take it easy.  (Pauses.)  Hold on, didn’t you move out of that roach magnet and into a new house in the suburbs not too long ago?  What gives?

ELMER

Yes, but, you see, this house is very small, less than 900 feet.  My wife wants all our boys to have their own rooms and she wants a new kitchen and we have a corner lot, so I--

JOE

--well, why didn’t you say so?!  You want to take that surplus off my hands?  That stuff left over from the jobs last season?  Help yourself, buck.

ELMER

Thank you; I owe you big, Mr. Joe.

JOE

Sure.  Hey, you want those pallets of cinderblocks for cheap?  I really need to free up the space for some new shipments.

ELMER

Yeah, I take those.  Also, I see you have very many leftover yellow bricks--

JOE

--go ahead and help yourself to those, too.  And you’ll need some mortar mix.  Y’know, I’ve even got some manufacturer mortar dye samples you can play with, if you want ’em.

ELMER

Oh, very good!  Thank you, man!

JOE

No problem, charlie.  Show me some photos once you get things going.

ELMER

I will!

The result:

A Lower Slumburbia DIY McMansion —
Fugly Supersized Rear Addition / Re-McModel Variant

That’s right, folks, it’s just your average slumburban

“Surplus Supply Shotgun Special” :



Now let’s examine this aesthetically-challenged architectural hybrid from hell:

1. On the right we have an original Dutch colonial brick-and-frame duplex with a quirky mansard roof, circa 1950.

2. On the left we have a brick-and-block millenial monstrosity, circa 2000-2003.

Exterior Side Wall (Northeast Exposure):

Let’s call this creative color scheme “Adobe Sunset” (or perhaps “El Dorado ” or “La Casa Puesta del Sol ” if we’re marketing to Spanish-speakers).

This wall features:

• 1/5 pink brick with white mortar

• 2/5 pale yellow brick with pink mortar

• 2/5 pale yellow brick with dun mortar

• flimsy builder-grade windows/doors

The spouse calls this ample annex the “Pink Elephant.”  I’ve gotta admit that it does kind of resemble a pink elephant, with its rosy coloration and ear-like frontal overhang.  And if I were one of the itinerant neighborhood drunks, it might make me do a double take, too.



Check out the decorative bricklaying 8-9 feet above grade.  The manic masons decided to lay down a course of “soldiered” bricks just above the first floor windows and side entry door.  The outer ends of the lintel blocks are flush with the corners of the windows, so they provide absolutely no structural advantage over the standard running bond brick pattern, which would have been functionally superior in this case.  (These corners should be fine as long as they used steel lintels, but they really squandered an opportunity to combine form and function in the masonry here.)

The railings look like they’re interior-grade, untreated wood that is supposed to be primed and painted, or at least stained and sealed.  Using this interior millwork for entryways seems to be very popular here in lower slumburbia.  Hence, you tend to see split and rotting wood railings (sometimes with missing balusters) that were installed just within the last 5-10 years.

Exterior Rear Wall (Southeast Exposure):

(If this vivid spectacle is not yet seared into your brain, feel free to scroll back up to reference the top photos again.)

• cinderblock painted a dullish custard yellow

• more cheap builder-grade windows/doors

Other Tidbits:

• assorted junk, typical of casual slumburban living, including the obligatory molded plastic patio chairs

• rebar-embedded cinderblock retaining wall, topped off with a layer of cement (Quikrete or somesuch)

• not pictured: generously proportioned shed/outbuilding, free-roving collie

Foreclosure Fallout in the Mid-County

A foreclosed home on the corner of Turkey Branch Pkwy & Independence St in lower Aspen Hill.
This neighborhood is not included in the county’s new focused revitalization program.
(Saturday, March 28.)

The Montgomery County Department of Housing and Community Affairs (DHCA) held a community “charrette” for its new Focused Neighborhood Assistance (FNA) program last night at Wheaton High School.  This was basically a public feedback and discussion session.  Evidently the term “charrette” comes from urban planning circles; it was originally applied mainly to creative sessions run by planners, policy-makers, designers, architects, and other experts.

In the March 31st meeting, any experts in attendance mostly acted as facilitators and observers, except during the introductory and wrap-up speeches, where county leaders treated us with enthusiastic exhortations such as “Be a squeaky wheel!” and “Be an informed wheel!”  (I grew up in this county and I have to say that the shrillest “squeaky wheel” residents can be exhausting and occasionally mildy terrifying to put up with.  Maybe having a comfortable salary and an advanced degree in some optimistic field like urban planning makes dealing with the restless rabble more tolerable.  The planning/housing eggheads at the meeting certainly seemed to be perky, perpetually positive-thinking types.)

For information on the FNA initiative, visit the county housing authority’s informational webpage:
“Foreclosure Prevention”

Most of the maps listed on the DHCA webpage link to large, rasterization-intensive PDFs (>1.5MB each).  These graphics were generated in February based on information released by real estate data clearinghouse RealtyTrac.  If you open up the countywide map (~2.85 MB), you’ll see that the greatest concentration of foreclosures occurs along a southeast-to-northwest axis.  This pattern closely aligns with many declining neighborhoods that tend to attract lower-income residents, as well as those blocks hit particularly hard by recent population destabilization and densification.

If you’re interested in the incidence of foreclosures throughout the entire state, check out Maryland’s Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) website for its Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), which features a map color-coded by foreclosure impact level.  A sum of $26.7 million has been allocated for this program; it’s unclear how much of that will find its way to Montgomery County.

The statewide residential stabilization program falls under Maryland’s Neighborhood Conservation Initiative (NCI), first rolled out in tandem with former governor Glendening’s statewide “Smart Growth” program.  Ultimately, Maryland’s push for “Smart Growth” fell far short of living up to its name, as Environment Maryland outlines in their sobering report, “Not So Smart: Land Consumption in Maryland after a Decade of Smart Growth.”

And yet even today, pro-growth advocates still caricature the opposition as “slow growth” obstructionists who stand in the way of economic “progress” and social “progressivism.”  This smear is pretty astounding, given the overwhelming evidence that the pro-development crowd that has dominated government and local politics over the last two decades has rammed through policies that have degraded quality of life measures throughout the county.  This trends have hit densely populated regions like swaths of the mid-county, as well as rapidly developing exurban regions that used to be more rural and rustic in character.  When pressed, a lot of long-term residents agree that this county has become a considerably less appealing place to live for much of the rising middle class.

And yet when you look at the District 4 Special Election, the few candidates in favor of more active measures to achieve residential population stabilization and safeguard the local environment are constantly sidelined and marginalized by the most well-funded Democratic campaigns, as well as local politics beat journalists.  It appears that the aggressive staffers and volunteers enlisted in these slicker campaigns have transferred much of the rhetoric, tactics, and funding streams used in the national political theater to a humble local council race.  They are counting on members of the usual lock-step, pamphlet-ready Democratic voting blocs to usher in their anointed candidates and shut out all of the other worthy contenders, many of whom are long-term residents and civic activists who have a much more direct ground-level appreciation of the history of this area and the steady decline many of these neighborhoods have experienced for decades.

“Growth is good” is about as sound a statement as “Money quells all ills” or “Poverty is ennobling.”

“Smart” growth in Montgomery County quickly devolved into shortcut growth-at-all-costs expansion and an explosion in construction/renovation projects driven by developers who seduced politicians and residents with their visions of economic invigoration and a transformed metropolitan landscape.  A lot of residents, particularly in the west county, have profited handsomely from these policies.

The decline in rising middle-class neighborhoods like mine has been swift and dramatic during the 2000s.  Top-down policies and planning measures that catalyzed fast growth starting in the late 1990s rapidly created thousands of low-end jobs with depressed/stagnant wages.  Loosening credit standards, misleading leftist political rhetoric, and an ever-expanding stock of cramped and crowded slumburban rental units and sub-units helped paved the way for this steady race to the bottom.

And unlike in places like northern Virginia, broad economic development and job growth hasn’t kept pace with the residential overpopulation and densification bubble in Maryland.  Now that county employees are increasingly missing out on perks like cost-of-living adjustments, they may finally develop a deeper appreciation of what so many other residents are struggling with right now.

And yes, “densification” appears to be a legitimate word.  Using it here only invites obvious slurs about the stupefication of local leaders and residents during the Dumb Money decade.  (Hey, I sipped half-heartedly at the Kool-Aid, too, until about 2004 or so.)

Well, well.  Google tells me that British tunesmith Graham Parker once wrote a song titled “Stupefication.”  This minor associative tidbit gives me the perfect pretext for including my gratuitous music vid embed of the day, an early new wave gem from three decades back:



This song — from Parker’s 1979 acclaimed LP Squeezing Out Sparks — arguably has a quasi-suburban feel to it, especially since the accompanying vid features plenty of goofy girl-next-door Londonettes along with the come-hither caddishness of Mr. Parker.

Ahem, now let me return to the weighty subject of mid-county suburban decay.

* * *

The county’s revitalization program targets a few key areas hit hard by foreclosures, including one upcounty region (Germantown).  Their mid-county target area is Glenmont.

I wish I could say that this is merely a pilot program, but it looks like county officials are being very cautious about the initiative because of their depleted budget and re-shuffled policy priorities.  Ms. Cantor of the Mid-County Regional Services Center used the word “scant” at least twice while describing the level of funding available for the effort.  Speaking for County Exec Leggett, one official emphasized that local priorities are currently ordered as follows: “public safety, education, and safety net services.”

It looks like Montgomery County has been monitoring preliminary and active residential foreclosure trends for several years, along with the socioeconomic and other demographic data they normally compile and analyze for policy guidance.

I excerpt one of these maps below; again, the data was current as of February.

This is a snapshot approximating foreclosure activity in west Wheaton and Glenmont during the 4th quarter of FY 2008.

FNA = Focused Neighborhood Assistance
CAE = Connecticut Avenue Estates

For the original maps this graphic is extracted from, again, see the DHCA’s foreclosure resource webpage.

The area surrounded in blue is the mid-county zone being targeted by this program.  The vast majority of people within this area identify as Glenmont residents.  (Glenmont and Wheaton share the same census-designated place, or CDP.)

My household falls within the triangular area outlined in red, which roughly comprises much of the the “Connecticut Avenue Estates” (CAE) legal subdivision.  (Portions of “Connecticut Avenue Park” and “Montgomery Highland Estates” are cordoned within this red boundary as well, albeit unintentionally.)  There are at least a thousand households with the CAE subdivision designation; at least a couple of hundred of them are located in the southern region of the county’s targeted area, north of Randolph Road.  CAE is an aging high-density subdivision that the county has targeted before in combatting mid-county suburban blight.

Too Little, Too Late?

We’ve got a mid-county landscape studded with foreclosures and overshadowed with many other manifestations of creeping suburban blight.  These trends have been worsening for the past fifteen years or so, accelerating during the last 5 - 7 years.

While we are grateful that the county is finally addressing these long-developing patterns after all these years of decay and neglect, it’s frustrating that officials can only muster up the resources to focus on this very circumscribed area for this latest round of revitalization efforts.  Even with these well-defined constraints, DHCA officials made sure to repeatedly temper residents’ expectations about the project at Tuesday night’s meeting, which is certainly a good idea during this lean fiscal era.

If anybody has any other ideas about how or why county leaders arrived at this particular targeting decision, I’d really like to hear it.  I think they may have been chosen in part because of an emerging groundswell of civic involvement within that neighborhood.  Congratulations to the men and women behind the new Greater Glenmont Civic Association (GGCA).  The county is obviously looking to capitalize on the energy and “human resources” within these neighborhoods in its FNA initiative.  Incidentally, GGCA seems to tilt toward the southeastern portion of the region highlighted in the map above, which is centered on the subdivision known as “Glenmont Village” near the Glenmont Metro station.  The western regions of the neighborhood seemed somewhat isolated from this civic movement (e.g. portions of “Glenmont Hills,” “Connecticut Avenue Park,” and “Stoneybrook Estates”).

Those of us in neighboring communities (e.g. west Wheaton, Aspen Hill & north Kensington) really ought to redouble our own efforts to resurrect and support our own flagging and oft-neglected neighborhood groups.

Because confessions shouldn't just be for Catholics...

“Yours is the only version of my desertion
that I could ever subscribe to,
That is all that I can do.
. . .
You’re so cute when you're frustrated, dear
Yeah, you’re so cute when you're sedated, dear
Oh yes dear...
.
.
.
You are a past sinner, the last winner, and
everything we’ve come to,
(it) makes you you, you...”


Was Paul Banks taking the piss out of our cohort here?  He sounds like he was in thrall of a damaging friendship or affair here.

      

What if you screamed “INSOLVENCY!” at the top of your lungs in a crowded, chaotic “marketplace of ideas” in the middle of a global economic implosion?

Would some Globalist Stasi arrest you for your damaged tin-foil hat fomenting?

I felt a burning compulsion to unleash this conniption recently:

re: Is this for real? (FDIC)    (Solvency.........for now.......)

      

“And you will not reach me I am resenting a
position that’s past resentment and now
I can’t consider, and now there is this distance, so...

Sleep tight, grim rite,
we have two-hundred couches where you can
sleep tight, grim rite,
we have two-hundred couches where you can
sleep tight, grim rite,
we have two-hundred couches where you can
sleep tonight
    …You’re a simpleton…
sleep tonight
    …(You’re) a simpleton…
sleep tonight
    …Can I follow?…
sleep tonight
...”
[4] Turn on the Bright Lights, 2002

A very few people hear “dream right” instead of “grim rite,” which makes some contextual sense, but I just can’t hear it.

(Yes, I realize that this indie rock dirge is ~7 years old but I need to hear something other than the throbbing sobbing bass-line subwoofing coming from the neighbor’s unit.)

Housing False Starts

Below is a digitally vandalized version of a Flash ad I saw yesterday on a major DC metro website.


This was a rather large skyscraper-format ad run by a company that has consistently ranked among the top ten large-volume homebuilders during the crest of the 2000s U.S. housing bubble.

For some reason the ad has huge expanses of white space, some of which I filled with my own vulgar “copy.”

I omitted the bottom section, which looks almost blank.  If you mouseover this area on the real ad, you will see links to “quick move-in homes” in:

“Suburban Maryland ~ From the $500s”
“Baltimore Metro ~ From the $300s”
“Eastern Shore ~ From the mid $200s”

(These items may be geographically filtered based on my user profile, which indicates that I am a Maryland resident.)

If you click on any of these, you will be taken to the builder’s website featuring listings of luxurious exurban McMansions.

Perhaps the builder is counting on the fact that oil prices have partially collapsed due to the global economic contraction, so high-consumption-oriented prospective homebuyers are more likely to tolerate long commutes to job centers like D.C. and Baltimore.

In any case, the original unvandalized ad struck me as perverse and even anachronistic in March 2009.

Welcome to Slumburbia. Now get lost.

I live in slumburbia.

I started using this term about 4-5 years ago, right around the crescendo of the housing bubble. At the time, the term didn't have much currency. Mainly the only other person using it on the web was some visual artist from Canada.

If you're in your 20s or 30s and grew up liberal and neurotic; the suburbs are a Tragically Unhip* place to live. The suburbs are considered a destination for losers and clueless middle Americans. I know this because I used to be one of those self-hating liberals. Now I'm an independent and over 30 so I don't have so much patience for this culture anymore.

*another Canadian allusion there

California Über Alles:

Early last spring, San Francisco real estate journalist Carol Lloyd used the term to apply to some rather spacious tract house communities around the Bay area. To be quite honest, far-leftist anti-sprawl activists would like nothing more than to see suburbia rot. It's powerful symbolism, like vandalizing Eisenhower’s tomb or something.

But I have to say that this is such an absurd application of the term slumburbia. Anybody applying this neologism to millenial large-lot McMansion boom developments in central Cali has never experienced authentic American slumburban living in a fifties-era small-lot roach magnet. And even I know that the corner of slumburbia I live in has nothing on the strains of slumburbia found in L.A. County.

Luckily, around the same time as the San Francisco Chronicle / SFGate article, The Atlantic published a more well-researched piece that extended the term beyond outer-ring exurbs.

Here is an excerpt:
“On the other hand, many inner suburbs that are on the wrong side of town, and poorly served by public transport, are already suffering what looks like inexorable decline. Low-income people, displaced from gentrifying inner cities, have moved in, and longtime residents, seeking more space and nicer neighborhoods, have moved out.”
“The Next Slum?,” The Atlantic, March 2008

Now, that’s the slumburbia I’m talking about. The old housing stock slumburbia. The middle-class flight slumburbia. The slumlord rental units slumburbia. The lawn-paved-over-into-a-mini-parking-lot slumburbia.

Now that's my corner of America.

Welcome to slumburbia, friends. You must be lost.

So here's a tip: Lock your car doors, do a U-turn in the clogged cul-de-sac up there, and keep driving until you get to the mall.