America's "Emergency Powers" Emergency

An exaggerated "emergency," exploited and prolonged for political purposes.

Snitch lines that turn "neighbors" into informers.  

Government monitoring of alleged scofflaws, aimed at forcing compliance with capricious, arbitrary, unjustified dictates.

No, this isn't another post about the mass panic and growing tyranny unleashed by COVID-19. It's a protest against Colorado Springs Utilities Board's "emergency" water rules, which share striking similarities more clearly visible in hindsight. The COVID-19 crisis brought the potential misuse and abuse of "emergency powers" into clearer focus for many of us. But the temptations such arbitrary powers present to petty tyrants were there to see before Covid-19 engraved the invitation. 

These "emergency" water restrictions were put in place by the utilities board (on which I once served) late last year, in December, when lawn-watering rules were the last thing on most of our minds. That was also before we saw how the COVID19 "emergency" would be exploited by petty tyrants to flex their little muscles. But in retrospect, we can see a similar power play unfolding.

The COVID-19 threat is real enough, especially for the sick, the deceased, others who were or are directly effected. But no analogous water emergency looms in Colorado Springs -- not even close. It's a figment of the board's imagination, a manufactured "crisis" that conveniently gives members power to lord it over alleged water-wasters like a bunch of Karens (or "Gladys Kravitzes," if you prefer.)

Water is a reasonably scarce resource, obviously, depending on natural fluctuations. And we live in an arid zone -- the "Great American Desert," as it was known before reclamation projects made the desert hospitable. Water conservation makes sense, but so does water use, since there's only so much water we can store and the elaborate and costly water infrastructure we've built-out over the years to store and steward water -- the reservoirs and pipelines, pumping stations and water treatment facilities -- must be paid for. Charging utilities customers a reasonable sum for using water is how all that infrastructure (and the debt we accrue building and maintaining it) is funded, pointing to a glaring contradiction in how CSU treats water users.

Water use is what pays for the system, so why is the city-owned utility treating water users like villains, scofflaw's or bad neighbors? A tiered rate structure already helps ensure that heavy water users pay more. Going beyond that when not in the midst of a real or looming crisis strikes me as social engineering, not smart water management.

And these restrictions go far beyond the three-sprinkles-per-week rule -- by barring puddled water on your driveway, for instance, which makes hand-washing your car against the rules -- inviting a level of surveillance and intrusiveness by CSU that's unprecedented in the city's history.

Reported the Gazette:

"The rules will also prohibit residents from using water to clean sidewalks, driveways and patios, “except when cleaning with water is necessary for public health or safety reasons or when other cleaning methods are impractical or inappropriate.” Utilities customers will be barred from allowing water that’s meant for irrigation to pool on paved surfaces or accumulate in gutters and drains.

The regulations also advises against watering landscapes during high wind or precipitation events and recommend that hoses with nozzles be used to wash vehicles and that restaurants refrain from serving drinking water unless a patron requests it."

So why were these needlessly-restrictive rules in place? Apparently, just because a majority on the City Council/Utilities Board believed it could impose them without raising a public squawk. It's a sort of warm-up for the alleged water shortages we may face 50 years into the future -- a tool for conditioning and training CSU customers in anticipation of water shortages that may or may not arise, depending on a dozen, hard-to-predict variables.

My guess is that the impetus for this -- like the impetus for virtually everything Colorado Springs does as a city -- comes from the development community, which fears that the cost of tap fees might rise when the massive growth slated for areas like Banning Lewis Ranch begins to explode. Thus, established and existing residents are being forced to abide by water restrictions in order to accommodate the new growth the city's usual "Movers and Shakers" are banking on, literally and figuratively.
       

Perhaps we should go back and review these watering restrictions in light of what we now know about how real or manufactured "crises" are exploited by political leaders to advance secondary and tertiary agendas. We need to understand that any latitude we cede to petty tyrants in government will be exploited for maximum gain. We need to closely guard against granting any politicians "emergency" powers that aren't in response to an actual emergency.

Bitter Harvest

Detroiters (and ex-Detroiters, like moi) tend to develop a dark gallows humor about the city, because the only alternative is to weep at what the once mighty Motown has become. So I chose to snicker rather than cry when I ran across this story on a website called City Farmer News, indicating that some in the "urban agriculture" movement see a great future for my old home town -- as a fruit and vegetable stand.

That's because the Detroit diaspora has left about 30 percent of the city (or about 40 square miles) as vacant land, with little near-term prospect for redevelopment. The city's population is 900,000 and falling, from a peak of 2 million back in the early 1950s. Another estimate says the city will be about 50 percent empty before long. And things aren't likely to turn around soon, even if the U.S. auto industry can survive federal "help."

Straining to find the silver lining to this cloud, urban planners argue that all these empty lots -- all this unintended "open space" -- will help make Detroit one of the "greenest" big cities in America. Some consolation that is. Others imagine that farms might begin to spring up in the urban core, furnishing locals with farm-fresh produce and perhaps a few jobs. It will be homesteading in reverse; 40 acres (and a mule?) for anyone who has the nerve to set up a farm in Indian Country.

Few in the city will have work, but all will eat healthy. Motown will become Growtown! No one will prattle on about the need for more "open space." It will be the first major American city to revert to a village. Detroit will win awards for "sustainability."

But this proposal has stirred controversy. Some believe downtown Detroit should be farmed commercially, while others, like a group called Greening of Detroit, "supports small family and neighborhood plots of no larger than 3 acres," according to the Detroit Free Press. Greening of Detroit worries "that commercial farming would exploit Detroiters and their land," reports the newspaper.

Isn't that just like Detroit? The jobs don't exist, yet they're already worried about "exploitation." One possible answer to that is for the city's urban farmworkers to organize under the UAW, forming a new union called the UAAW, for United Auto and Agricultural Workers. They can produce $17 cucumbers right alongside their $36,000 lemons, and, as long as federal agriculture and automaker subsidies keep coming, Detroit might yet be saved.

Or maybe not.

Obviously, I think the whole scenario is pathetic and absurd. No one talks any more about a Detroit "renaissance," which boosters have been predicting for decades. Now, after all the other promises and gimmicks (like casino gambling) have failed to pan out, they're debating whether the urban meadowlands should be planted in soybeans or alfalfa or sweet corn. No matter what they plant there, it will be a bitter harvest, in my opinion, and always leave a bad taste in my mouth.


Who or what is to blame for Detroit's demise? That would take a book to tackle. But it's largely a man-made calamity I'm sure -- the result of failed policy-making at the federal, state and especially local level. My dad used to make this point, in his own inimitable fashion, when, after giving out-of-towners a cook's tour of post-apocalyptic parts of the city, or during general discussions about the deteriorating situation, he would ask: "Who destroyed Detroit?" This question confused some and discomforted others, so there was usually a pregnant pause, as everyone waited for the moment to pass. Then he'd diffuse the tensions the question created with a weird punchline. "Martians destroyed Detroit," he'd laugh. "The Martians are to blame."

Here's the entire post, for those with a morbid curiosity about the death of a great American city:

Acres of barren blocks offer chance to reinvent Detroit

By John Gallagher
Detroit Free Press
December 15, 2008

Detroit’s thinning population is vividly - some would say disturbingly - illustrated in a new map that is creating a buzz in local planning circles. The map shows how to tuck the land mass of Manhattan (23 square miles), San Francisco (47 square miles) and Boston (48 square miles) — and their combined populations of nearly 3 million people — into Detroit. All three urban areas fit snugly within Detroit’s 139 square miles with room to spare.

Detroit, where the population peaked at 2 million in the early 1950s, is home to about 900,000 today and is still losing people. The depopulation and demolition of abandoned properties has left the city dotted with thousands of vacant parcels, ranging from single home lots to open fields of many acres.

The map is the handiwork of Dan Pitera, a professor of architecture at University of Detroit Mercy. He says he created it as a simple and dramatic illustration of how underpopulated Detroit has become. To see for yourself: Use Google Earth or a similar computer program to fly over the city and see how many vacant parcels you can find. Pitera estimates that all that empty land adds up to about 40 square miles — nearly the land mass of San Francisco.

His conclusion: Hopes and plans to repopulate the city and to redevelop all the city’s vacant land, are unrealistic, at least for another generation. Some redevelopment deals will succeed, but realistic Detroiters should seize the opportunity to become a leaner, greener city for the 21st Century.

“What if a lot of the vacant land was allowed to begin to become green?” Pitera said. “Could Detroit truly become the greenest city in the United States?”

This abundance of vacant land has people talking about new uses, such as urban farming, reforesting the city, and large-scale recreational areas. Urban farming is getting the most buzz.

Michigan State University’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources is among the groups touting urban farms as a solution for Detroit’s vacant land. “Given the amount of open land, I think there’s a real opportunity for Detroit to provide a significant amount of its fruits and vegetables for its population and the surrounding area,” said Mike Hamm, the C.S. Mott Chair of Sustainable Agriculture at MSU.

Besides providing nutritional value for Detroiters, Hamm said, “I think it can help create jobs and some small businesses in the city, with the potential for spin-off businesses in processing and distribution.”

Good question for candidates

Detroiters are in the early stages of a spirited mayoral campaign. Pitera’s map shows the tough-love reality that candidates might consider as part of the debate about the city’s future.
“If I were the moderator at the mayoral debate, I’d put that question early on: How do we take some of the land out of the pipeline?” said Robin Boyle, chairman of Wayne State University’s geography and urban planning department.

The Free Press called several of the mayoral candidates to talk about the city’s vacant land but none returned the calls. Other Detroit leaders, though, told the Free Press that using vacant land for recreation, farming and other projects makes sense.

“If it comes to pass that there is a development that would be in the best interest of the city, then it could always be redeveloped,” former Mayor Dennis Archer said last week. “But in the meantime you could have great pocket parks, you could have children understanding how to raise a garden, harvest a fruit, vegetables. Those are invaluable things. I think it has a lot of merit.”

Finding the right words

Getting a debate started could be difficult because Boyle said Detroit lacks a vocabulary to create a new policy. Words like “shrinkage” and “downsizing” carry a whiff of defeat, he said. “Rightsizing” sounds bureaucratic and negative. “Wise use of resources” comes closer but is vague.

“So we’ve got a language problem,” Boyle says. “How do we talk about something that we don’t really know how to deal with? We can see it, we can feel it, but we don’t really know what to do about it.” Doug Diggs, director of the city’s planning and development department, says that “everything’s on the table” when it comes to finding new uses for Detroit’s empty spaces.
“The city had been built for up to 2 million people. Certainly we’re under a million right now. We have to think of new uses for those properties left behind to eliminate the blight.”

Onetime City of Elms

Ironically, Detroit during its mid-20th-Century heyday was then known as the City of Elms, a green city known for its parks. That reputation was lost as the city’s deteriorated. The city still has about 9 square miles of parks, including Belle Isle, but much more vacant land than parks. As far back as 1993, the late Marie Farrell-Donaldson, then the city’s ombudsman, sparked a tempest by suggesting that entire swathes of the city be cordoned off and returned to nature.

Farrell-Donaldson made her quickly ridiculed suggestion when Detroit’s population was still about 1 million. The regional planning agency Southeast Michigan Council of Governments now estimates that Detroit will have no more than about 700,000 residents by 2035.

89 square miles

Earlier this fall, some out-of-town planners recruited by the American Institute of Architects visited Detroit for a brainstorming session. The leader, Alan Mallach, research director of the National Housing Institute in Maplewood, N.J., concluded that Detroit needs no more than about 50 square miles of its land for its current population.The remaining 89 square miles could be used entirely for other purposes, he said.

Mallach’s group liked the suggestion of large-scale commercial farming, both as a way to put the space to good use and to generate new income and jobs for the cash-starved city.

Others aren’t so sure. Ashley Atkinson, director of project development in urban agriculture at the nonprofit Greening of Detroit, supports small family and neighborhood plots of no larger than 3 acres. But she says that commercial farming would exploit Detroiters and their land.Instead, she supports widespread use of open spaces for recreation, hobby gardens and other uses.
Opportunity to evolve

Something, though, must be done.

“We’re looking at a city that’s over 50% vacant within the next five to 10 years. It’s this huge, huge issue,” Atkinson says.

Whatever happens, clearly Detroit is evolving early in the 21st Century as a sort of blank slate. Instead of looking at shrinkage as a problem, many planners see it as an opportunity. Detroit has a chance to invent an entirely new urban model, they say.

Whether it’s farming or greenways or a network of thriving urban villages connected by transit lines, the solution could be uniquely Detroit’s. And the likelihood is that the rest of the world, already fascinated by Detroit’s urban drama, would take notice.

Keeping People in their Places

Bill Vogrin, who writes the "Side Streets" column for The Colorado Springs Gazette, last week unceremoniously exhumed the unsavory racist origins of neighborhood covenants in Colorado Springs -- covenants that continue to vex property owners of all colors and creeds today. Here's some language -- described as "boilerplate" for the era -- from a 1940 covenant placed on homeowners in one part of town:

"No lot in said tract shall at any time be lived upon by any person whose blood is not entirely that of the Caucasian race, and for the purpose of this paragraph, no Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, Hindu or any other person of the Ethiopian, Indian or Mongolian races shall be deemed to be Caucasian . . . If persons not of the Caucasian race be kept thereon by such a Caucasian occupant, strictly in the capacity of servants or employees of such occupant, such circumstance shall not constitute a violation."

We've come a long way since then, thankfully. Overt racism, at least of this sort, is today mostly hidden from view. But it's useful to at least recall the racist and exclusionist origins of these and other localized restrictions on property rights if we want to appreciate the continuing injustice at their core. Zoning laws have similar roots: they were first used in California to keep the Chinese on the other side of the tracks.

The overt racial overtones fell away as time passed. The Progressive era saw these sorts of laws put to use by organizing "experts" and uplifters. Along the way, their constitutionality was weighed and affirmed (wrongly) by courts. And they gradually became an entrenched part of the American landscape; unquestioned, unchallenged, but clearly unjust and un-American.

These laws began as a means of segregating people, along racial or socioeconomic lines, and they continue to function as such, albeit in much more subtle ways. Does that mean that people who support zoning, codes and neighborhood covenants, in their contemporary context, harbor racist leanings? Of course not. But they do tend to be the sorts of people who want to keep people in their places, figuratively and sometimes literally, forcing conformity to the collective by setting conditions on property rights. They value order more than they value freedom, regimentation more than property rights.

The fundamental unfairness that lies at the root of such rules persists, even if time and familiarity have made them, to most people, a respectable part of the modern American landscape.

What Detroit can learn from Dublin

Detroit, Michigan and Dublin, Ireland: The two cities would seem to have little in common except an intimate acquaintance with hard times. But Dublin, although a basket case in the 1980s, is today enjoying an exciting economic renaissance, while Detroit continues on a downward trajectory.

A thoughtful piece by Ellen Creager in today's Detroit Free Press asks what the Motor City might learn from Dublin's stunning success.

Not everything that worked for Dublin applies in Detroit. The Irish city has a major advantage in that it skipped over the industrial/manufacturing phase, leaping from agriculture to high tech, so there was less rebuilding and environmental clean-up to do. Dublin is a capital city; Detroit is not. And Detroit, though it once had beautiful neighborhoods, lacks some of the inherent charm which makes Dublin a tourist draw. Detroit's infamously high crime rate, as well as 47-50 percent functional illiteracy rate (Dublin's is 15-20 percent), may be insurmountable hurdles to climb over.

But where Detroit -- or any other American city -- can follow in Dublin's footsteps is on tax policy. Here's a key passage:

"Key to (Dublin's) success was Ireland's decision to slash its corporate income tax rate to 12.5%," writes Creager. "By turning itself into a tax haven, Ireland stole all kinds of European headquarters of multinationals (including 500 American firms) from neighboring European Union states.

That created jobs, which created wealth, which sent Dublin on an upward spiral.

Detroit has seen some growth based on tax breaks to companies like Compuware; Quicken Loans is expected to follow.

But could Detroit compete on corporate taxes? Unlikely. The United States has a 35% top corporate federal income tax rate, plus Michigan's new business tax is 4.95%."

Just slashing corporate taxes probably won't be enough to duplicate Dublin's success in Detroit. But it might help jump-start the Motor City's sputtering engine. And Detroit, at this point, has little to lose by trying.

"The biggest lesson Dublin may teach Detroit is that when you're on the bottom looking up, you've got to be bold," writes Creager. "When cities reinvent themselves as Dublin has and Detroit is trying to do, pain is involved, and some grief, and finally a rebirth."