The Corner of Main and Main: on Paul McKee’s never-ending sales pitch

With a nod to Jeff Wattrick’s naming of bridge-owning Matty Moroun as the Mr. Burns of Detroit, and in light of Tim Logan’s summary of land-banking Paul McKee’s salesmanship of his “vision” versus his actual record on following through with development, I have an observation to make.

Paul McKee is the Monorail Guy of Metro St. Louis, and he’s coming to make a presentation to a municipal council or lender near you!

I’ll admit it’s not a perfect metaphor. Even the Monorail Guy followed through on his promise to build what he pitched, and to create a couple of short-term jobs.

Sing it with me now: Monoraaail, monoraaaaail, monoraaaaaaail!

MetroLink Prom 2011

The fourth annual MetroLink Prom takes place tomorrow night, October 7, 2011, in St. Louis.

Being in the thick of schoolwork this evening I don’t have time to write about it as it deserves, so let me just direct you for details to their fun tumblr: Metro Prom.

The Drumline of St. Louis is going. A lot of well-dressed people are going. I hope like hell you’re going, too.

Love from Detroit,
cn-b

As the Mark Twain Branch meets its end, how do we make sure this won’t happen again?

Last night, I attended a meeting in my community about the fate of the Mark Twain Branch Library, the Detroit Public Library branch that served my area on the East Side until the branch closed in 1997. At the time of the closure, residents were told that the library needed a new roof and that it would reopen in two years. Currently, the Mark Twain Branch is famous on the Internet as an abandoned building still containing books and fixtures. After beating around the bush for quite some time, DPL representatives at this meeting stated (in response to an audience member’s direct question) that they intend to demolish the building as soon as they get the requisite permits and take care of matters with utility companies.

Other things I learned at the meeting: The Detroit Public Library targeted this community with mailers to promote a past library millage, which then passed, with the statement that the Mark Twain Branch would be renovated and reopened. There have been a number of failed efforts to make this renovation happen. DPL got a report saying that it would cost $6.9 million to renovate the library. The Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance will be building a new commercial building nearby on Gratiot and they would like DPL as a tenant. DPL may or may not keep operating the current Mark Twain Annex that serves the area currently in what was supposed to be a temporary capacity.

DPL’s maintenance crew has to board up the Mark Twain Branch two to three times a week and have dealt with some fairly blatant thieves at the site, but for some reason DPL still has equipment in the building. A lot of my neighbors seemed to want to keep the building, and in general everyone seemed to want clearer communication in the future. Karen Nagher from Preservation Wayne expressed concern as to the quality of demolition DPL will get for the $200,000 they are saying it will cost to tear down that large, solid building. The head of maintenance for DPL sidestepped questions from area residents about whether they would be recycling the materials from the building, to an extent that a simple “We’re not recycling anything” would have been more respectful and a time-saver. DPL says there is asbestos in the building, and I hope the immediate neighbors who asked them questions about it at tonight’s meeting will keep an eye out for dust when that $200,000 demolition goes down.

Another surprise that came out at tonight’s meeting was the fact that the Detroit Public Library has not considered the sale of the Mark Twain Library. This, too, came out in response to an audience member’s question. The ensuing rhetoric centered around the entirely theoretical challenge of finding an appropriate purchaser able to rehab the building for a suitable use. While vetting any potential buyer would be important, it stuck me as a funny for DPL Commissioners to fret about an owner misusing the site when DPL has misused the building so completely.

It is frustrating that years of mismanagement let a damaged roof turn into a teardown. At numerous points along the way, the current serious nuisance situation could have been avoided at much less cost. But this is where we are now: The teardown seems inevitable. Okay, the building is almost gone, that’s where we’re at.

My biggest takeaway from the meeting was that no Detroit Public Library representative present mentioned any sort of plan to prevent this from happening in the future. DPL has announced that instead of the erroneously-calculated closure of as many as 18 library branches, they will instead close around six branches this year. DPL representatives at the meeting were clear that closures will happen. Thus, DPL needs to communicate with communities individually and with Detroit as a whole what their plans are for responsible disposition of the properties or very serious mothballing (i.e. not another Mark Twain Branch). They also need to make a plan for the books and equipment that they will not move to other branches, and then they need to follow through.

DPL Executive Director Jo Anne Mondowney responded to a neighbor’s question about the left-behind books by stating that nobody could use the books that were left in the Mark Twain Branch. With all due respect, that’s simply not true. An audience member promptly responded out loud that she would have used some of the books. Thinking in practical terms, there are a bevy of organizations, local and national, which are glad to take books before they get covered in plaster dust, and this was much more than a handful of books left behind. If it’s too much work to contact a few separate organizations, wonderfully green Better World Books will pay shipping for book donations and then resell or recycle the books themselves. One large library where I worked in the past did a great deal of deaccessioning due to a lack of offsite storage, and Better World even provided numerous boxes for us to ship the books in for free on a regular basis. All we had to do was put the books into the boxes and tape on shipping labels. Heck, just a well-flyered and -bannered free book giveaway in the neighborhood would be better than another locking-up of so many books in a defunct building–this is Detroit and people are hungry for knowledge. In a city where the mismanagement of public dollars and moreover the perception thereof are a huge problem, wasting resources to this serious a degree and in such a visually arresting manner is not a PR slip that DPL should repeat.

One Mark Twain Branch has been a real loss. We don’t need six more. What has happened with the Mark Twain Branch has been a shame, but the Detroit Public Library can commit to taking a course of action with its coming closures that prevents this from happening again. Here’s hoping.

Closing the book on Detroit: Devastating closures proposed for the Detroit Public Library system

The Detroit Public Library is contemplating closing as many as 18 of its 23 branches due to budget shortfalls.

You’ve likely heard the statistic that Detroit’s functional illiteracy rate is nearly fifty percent, but it bears repeating. At the store where I worked last year, I got used to politely, patiently pointing out every last example of a product because a customer couldn’t read the package or the price. These customers could not distinguish between different varieties of a product because they couldn’t read the information on the box. Sometimes, they could not even find the thing they were looking for because so many toiletries are just liquid in text-covered bottles.

I had thought before about how an inability to read would make finding work hard, how it would make it pretty much impossible to vote, big things like that, but not until then had I considered the effect it can have on a person’s everyday ability to function. Several days ago when I hung out with a friend, she had just come from a cafe where the man in front of her was asking so many questions, she realized he probably couldn’t read the menu.

I wrote recently about the closure of the public library in relatively wealthy Troy, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. I wrote about how libraries have been proven again and again to have an outstanding return on investment, returning to their communities manyfold the number of dollars invested in them. I wrote, too, about how once a library is closed, the more time passes, the more it will cost to reopen the library. A lot of money is tied up in a library in the form of physical infrastructure, books, and equipment, to say nothing of the years of human effort embodied there, and closure throws these things into the rubbish bin. As time passes, it becomes increasingly unlikely that the library branch can ever be opened again. 

As much as I believe Troy needs its library, when I think about this loss coming to Detroit, I can barely make sense of it. Every city needs libraries, but a city like Detroit…. A source of free information and entertainment, a solid set of bootstraps, even a place to go during the day, these things are air and water here. They are absolutely necessary. Removing this vital source of self-improvement and access to employment resources is a hard slap in the face for a city with an unemployment rate estimated anywhere from 30 to 50%. Yes, there will still be some libraries, but Detroit is also a vast city where about one in three people lack cars and the public transit system plainly sucks. A lot of the people who need libraries the most don’t necessarily have the mobility to regularly travel beyond their neighborhoods.

If these DPL branches end up crumbling, scrapped, wide open, and full of decaying books, they would not be the first DPL branches to do so. We don’t have to speculate, because DPL’s record on responsible disposition of its resources–finding new homes for books and on mothballing and/or selling the building–is right there in front of our eyes. I hope they will do better with this round of closures, although no closures would be better.

On a personal note, part of the big, shiny daydream that convinced me to pack up my life and move to this city was the thought that I wanted to work in a Detroit Public Library branch someday, doing my little part to put a dent in the city’s illiteracy rate. I have worked in a city public library with at-risk youth, and I know what that entails, and I love it.

I feel guilty even writing this down knowing that some of my favorite Detroiters and that many curious-about-Detroit people are going to read it, but the news of these cuts makes it a lot harder for me to imagine my future here. It’s not just the evaporation of so many jobs, but a significant blow to my line of work and to library workers in this region, period. When I first read the article, the image that popped into my head was of driving around my neighborhood and finding billboards reading I’D TURN BACK IF I WERE YOU. I could blow that sentiment up and talk about employment and opportunity networks and trying to stem brain drain, but you know what? The biggest loss here isn’t my silly white hipster self being more likely to move away or to keep working in low-wage retail after getting my degree. The big loss here is for those Detroiters who don’t have any other place to go or to take their kids. 

And hey: Closing libraries serves, in its way, to reinforce the gap between educated me and the most desperate people in my city. Rather than being able to use my knowledge and skills to help them acquire knowledge and skills, I am that much more likely to take my education elsewhere. I am more likely to be gone, and they’re more likely to be stuck. 

To all actors in the Detroit Public Library budget situation, whether you feel complicit in creating the current crisis or not, please get it together and do everything you can to fix this. You know this is real, and that it is a decision not easily taken back. This city goes daily without many of the bare minimum services and dignities needed for a municipality to function, but that doesn’t mean we should add this one to the list. In fact, we need our libraries precisely because we have virtually nothing else. Please, stop as many of these library closures as you can. Don’t cut Detroit’s bootstraps.

Post-Dispatch’s election day coverage won’t get your ankles wet

This is what StLToday passes off as election day coverage:

Few races to watch in today’s ward primary in St. Louis

Sorry, y’all, but you are the major newspaper of a large American city. You have to do better. Jake Wagman’s piece does not even note the names of aldermanic challengers in some races, let alone discuss their platforms or their records. We wouldn’t want anybody thinking about public policy specifics on election day, now would we? Instead of even mentioning candidates’ names, Wagman opts to simply observe that contested races exist and “upsets are possible.” Maybe next election day, the P-D can publish an equally informative piece about how the sky is blue.

If this is the kind of political information that many voters have to go on, how the hell are they going to make a remotely informed decision? I know it’s “just” a primary, but in single-party St. Louis, the primary generally is the election.

How important are aldermanic races? Ask someone who lives next to an LRA-owned vacant building. The alderman gets discretion over not only over who can buy an LRA building, but whether that building is even listed for sale in the first place. In a 65 square mile city that elects its Board of Alderman by 28 teeny tiny districts, your alderman is a big deal.

You know who loves shallow election coverage? Incumbents–both individuals, and the larger power structure itself. Shallow political coverage like this only encourages ongoing stagnation at 1200 Market.

A few hasty thoughts on early census numbers for St. Louis

The AP has early census numbers for St. Louis City, showing that the city’s population is down 8% from 2000. It’s now around 319,000 people.

Damn, StL, damn.

The Slay administration has made challenging the census numbers a cornerstone of their spin. It was strange to hear such sunny figures while watching the Near North Side bleed families directly or indirectly because of Paul McKee’s land acquisition. My neighbors and I kept hearing about evictions, talking with people who were leaving, and seeing moving vans. So many occupied buildings went vacant and often disappeared altogether. Anecdotal evidence seemed to suggest that nearly everyone was heading to North County. If Slay’s numbers were accurate, I thought, there musta been a hell of a lot of people moving in and staying on the South Side and in the Central Corridor.

To be sure, McKee is not the only factor when 30,000 people have left. Eviscerated schools, a persistent problem with crime, transit cuts, ubiquitous lead in housing, and paltry employment opportunities all play a major part in the difficult decision to stay or go. Daily life needs to be functional, and I think that often gets lost in the shuffle of talking about glamorous large-scale projects and attracting middle class creatives to cities. Nonetheless, I think the fact that Slay and friends think they can support a project that seeks to depopulate an enormous swath of the city and still end up with good census numbers speaks volumes about how much they think North St. Louis matters.

I am curious to learn the specifics when more numbers come out,  and to hear the spin coming out of Room 200 about this in the coming days.

Troy, Michigan, is closing its public library. Yes, really.

…because Troy has a 100% literacy rate, no poverty, no one without a computer, and everyone has infinite money to go on Amazon. Right? 

Jeff Wattrick has the story and commentary here: Troy Library will close April 30, or Troy is your new Highland Park.

As a future librarian, I of course have to be painfully literal and point out that Highland Park, despite the many serious problems it faces, is at least trying to reopen its library. They see the mistake that they made. Troy apparently doesn’t want to learn from it.

It appears that eliminating the library will cut $1.7 million from Troy’s budget. But how much does Troy “save” by discarding millions of dollars worth of books, equipment, and human work accumulated over the years, hm?

Does anybody know what is going to happen to the books? Are they going to other area libraries, or will they just be abandoned in place like those of the East St. Louis Public Library (photo), DPL’s Mark Twain Branch, and countless DPS libraries and facilities? I know, we metro Detroiters have seen images of abandoned books before. I know Troy is not Detroit, but images of abandoned books are relevant here in that the longer the library is closed, the harder and more expensive it will be for Troy to have a library again. Right now, Troy, your city has a viable library that only needs $1.7 million to stay open. How many years of having the library closed will it take for that number to double? For it to multiply tenfold? Disseminate the books and you might never feasibly be able to afford a library again. 

Is there no option on the table to operate at reduced hours? I ask this, but a quote in Wattrick’s article notes that Troy Councilman Martin Howrylak found $1.7 million of “unusued expenditures” in the budget that could be used to fund the library, but Mayor Louise Schilling and other members of the City Council turned down a resolution to discuss it. Money is tight, to be sure, but it does not sound like money is the only issue here. (This article hints at more political squabbling.)

I almost hate to put the idea out there, but the government of Troy could have a yard sale and get rid of the books for pennies on the dollar, making sure this is as fiscally wasteful as possible. The community’s literacy will be stunted for years across the age and income spectrum, people without ‘net access will have no place to seriously job search, kids whose parents aren’t tuned in to reading and schoolwork won’t have that important extra source of help and mentoring, AND they’ll do away with one of the last indoor public spaces a lot of communities have…. But they could narrow this year’s budget gap by like ten whole dollars! For three years!

Countless studies a show that a dollar invested in a public library comes back to the community manyfold. Here are just a few:

$1 Invested Yields $5 Return
Fort Morgan Library returns $8.80 for every $1 spent, according to study
And a big academic round-up: Economic Impact of Public Libraries

Across the country, libraries find that in times of recession, library usage increases:
2010 State of America’s Libraries
Library usage will go up during a recession

Anecdotally, too, I have heard colleagues working in libraries across the country speak of being busier and of watching the numbers of new library card applications increase as the economy has struggled in the last few years. This begs the question: If Troy is really hurting fiscally, doesn’t that mean it needs its library? A community in Southeast Michigan, of all places, should not scoff at the last place that many people are able to access employment resources.

Of course, Mayor Schilling and certain Councilmembers are not the only ones who voted against the library. A November 2010 vote on a tax increase to keep the library open was voted down. 

Does a rising tide not lift all boats in largely affluent Troy? I’m sure there are those in the community who are content to buy or pirate books and media, and to keep it for themselves in their private households, public good be damned. And yes, there is Google, but arguments about information quality and the value of information specialists aside, not everyone has Internet access at home. Your neighbor who now can’t use the library to find a job just might end up getting foreclosed upon, and that empty house is gonna be awesome for your property values. More teens will be without a safe non-home hangout and homework help, and more seniors will be stuck at home more of the time. Want to read or watch some really obscure title you can’t find on the Internet or to do some serious research? Too bad, Interlibrary Loan and newspaper databases are out of the question now.

The people this will hurt the most are those without computers at their jobs and without institutional (i.e. school) access to information–yep, nice ‘n classist. According to this article, Troy residents who want library access will have to buy a card from a nearby community, the cost of which starts at $75. Not everyone can afford to do that. This is a big step towards greater information access inequality in the area.

I don’t think Troy is going to collapse tomorrow just because they’re closing the library, but I do think this measure is pennywise and pound foolish.

The good librarian side of me is sad for the residents of Troy and frightened that this is even being considered somewhere in my region. But let’s be honest, my bad librarian side is gettin’ parochial: You wanna close your library, Troy? Go ahead–at least that’s one thing we still have in Detroit.

How many St. Louis aldermen does it take to change a lightbulb?

a) I think Matt Villa just abruptly resigned to find out.

b) My committeeperson’s sister runs a lightbulb company and would like to talk to you.

c) Which side of Delmar is the lightsocket on? I see. Well, the city will go 50/50 with you on the cost, even though your community is missing light fixtures in a lot of places, while people across town have gilt lamps ready to take fresh bulbs.

d) at least 28. At least.

e) The Building Division does not know, nor does it know anything about the recent rash of lightbulb rustling.

f) Your thoughts?

Yesterday in Highland Park, I got

1. three styrofoam wig heads

2. catcalled repeatedly

3. a replacement phone charger and two plastic phone cases

4. a couple of unexciting snapshots of the oft-documented abandoned municipal campus

5. told “If you want coffee, honey, go to Wendy’s” after my second failed attempt to buy a cup at an independent business

6. asked how I broke in my cowgirl boots, and if I am churchgoing.

I hope you know something I don’t.

My friend Nell believes that the man on late-night TV can wipe away your debt with spring water. The man says it is a gift that God gave him. “I’m gonna call him. See what it’s about.”

D and I are skeptical. “With water?” D asks. “Water.”

Nell tells him about the people on the show, how much debt they had. “One lady had $350,000. Gone. Another lady had a million dollars debt, and he cleaned it all away.”

D asks, “You know how much she got paid to be on that infomercial?”

I chime in: “I’ll wipe your debt away for $50. Whatever he charges, I’ll beat his price.” D points out that the guy on TV uses spring water. I respond, “I only use Aquafina!”

We try different tactics, but Nell refuses to be moved. We don’t have an infomercial for our arguments, nor the shiny delight of instant deliverance from debt in a city famously short on economic opportunity. All we’ve got is the dull assertion that $20 you save by not getting ripped off is $20 you get to keep.

“Nell, man.”

“You know how you say it’s hard to tell who your real friends are? The magic water money guy is not your friend.”

“I’m gonna call him first thing in the morning. Just to see what it’s about. First thing in the morning.” And later: “I’m going to put $20 on high eights at Motor City tonight. If you win, that’s $2000.”