If I were in a foamcore fantasy band...

I just ran across this local blog, “Foam Core Fantasy.”  I discovered it because the author (who goes by Cyndy) sometimes comments on Scenic Wheaton’s blog.  (My running joke about the difference between my own Wheaton blog and “Scenic Wheaton” is that mine could easily be titled “Splenic Wheaton.”)

When I first saw the phrase “Foam Core Fantasy,” it struck me as an excellent name for a band.  The band’s sound would be something like mildly spacey effects-heavy synth pop backed with hair metal guitar.

Like some unholy fusion of Esqu¡vel, Erasure, Pet Sh0p Boys, Def Leppard, and Poison, maybe.

It turns out that the foam core in question actually describes something along the lines of engineered pre-fab construction panels with extraordinary R-values.

I have no idea where the foam core blogger’s house is located or even whether it’s in Montgomery County, for that matter.  A few of the exterior photos suggest some semi-rural suburban gentrification haven like Olney or Burtonsville.  The house pictured exudes a sort of 21st-century farmhouse exurban boho chic.

I’ve stumbled across other similar blogs while searching for home improvement keywords and FCF falls under what I might call the “home remodeling fetish” blog genre.

Due to our current circumstances, I personally favor the “Xtreme DIY” blogs that get into the nuts and bolts of home improvement materials and practices.  The XDIY blogs are good sources of know-how and inspiration for people who can’t (stand to) pay other people to perform improvement & reconstruction work for them.

Anyways, the FCF blog inspires me to put more home “improvement” stuff up here in this sprawling blogspace, once the spouse and I get back into the low-budget demolition & seat-of-our-pants “design-build” renovation work later this spring.

More pictures + less blogorrhea  ==  less echo-chamber diarist blogging

(I was originally going to embed a video of “If I were a carpenter” in this post.  Ultimately, I just couldn’t bring myself to inflict any of the cheesy versions of that song on the few hapless souls who stumble on this junk heap of blogging damage.)

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.

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.