Progress without Displacement

From the WBUR podcast The Common comes the encouraging story of Upham's Corner, a Boston neighborhood within the bigger Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. A national study suggests that Uphams Corner (the apostrophe has become optional) is achieving what is often an elusive balance: developing economically without displacing it residents or losing its character. That is, it is experiencing improvement without gentrification. 

The podcast episode is a conversation between journalist Darryl C. Murphy and researcher Rohit Acharya of Common Good Labs. The discussion draws on "Reducing poverty without community displacement: Indicators of inclusive prosperity in U.S. neighborhoods," a 2022 study that Acharya wrote with Rhett Morris for the Brookings Institution. 

Photo: Metropolitan Area Planning Council

The conversation is national in scope, but with a rich local example. That part of the conversation draws on "The neighborhood that got it right," a 2023 Boston Globe article by journalist David Scharfenberg. The combination of academic analysis and journalistic storytelling is a great way to explore this important topic. 

Transit-oriented Development

The Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) of Massachusetts is hearing a very nuanced case at the intersection (pun intended) of transit policy and housing policy. As the case came before the court, I heard discussions on several local programs; I think the best overview is provided by Darryl C. Murphy and Rob Lane in a recent Radio Boston segment on WBUR.

In short, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA or more commonly "the T") requires the communities it serves to enact zoning regulations that encourage high-density residential development. Since the T serves almost half of the 351 cities and towns in the Commonwealth (we use Pilgrim-era names for everything around here), this was a way for the General Court (i.e., the state legislature) to exert control over questions of land-use that are otherwise the purview of those localities. 

The merits of such requirements are not central to the case before the SJC, in which the town of Milton has refused to enact the regulations dictated by the T. Rather, it seems that by promoting the land-use policy indirectly, the legislature chose the wrong vehicle (again, pun intended) for its goals. 

An interesting facet of this case is that Milton was told it would be subject to certain penalties if it failed to act. As a community, Milton essentially said, "okay" and thought that accepting the penalty would be the end of the matter. It might very well be.  If so, the Judicial Court might be sending the General Court back to the proverbial drawing table.

Helene to Milton

I am not sure how I will conclude this post, but it is beginning as a place to gather a few items to share with my environmental geography class, as I spend the week of Hurricane Milton's landfall away from class. When we gather again, I will want to review a few things from a very eventful week.

A Very Strange Case of Climate Politics

Image: Anderson Design Group
Novella: Robert Louis Stevenson

This literary comparison came to me in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, the second to ravage Florida in as many weeks. I was listening to a briefing on C-SPAN that was led by Gov. Ron DeSantis. He and other officials detailed what was known of the damage, the federal, state, and local responses, and what was to be expected in coming hours and days. They mentioned lessons learned from prior experiences and provided very clear guidance based on those lessons. He exuded competence and compassion throughout the entire briefing. 

In the moment, he seemed to be exactly what Florida needed. But he bears some responsibility for that moment. All of us do to some degree, but he is working deliberately to make climate change more damaging. It makes no sense, because he knows better than anyone what the damage looks like. He has famously prohibited discussion of climate change by state employees. He has also vetoed measures that would have both lesson the state's contribution to climate change and increased the resilience of coastal areas. 

Federal Response

Among the many Federal resources assisting in the hurricane response are the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service, both of which are part of NOAA -- an agency that Project 2025 seeks to privatize. Another important agency, of course, is FEMA -- the Federal Emergency Management Administration. To his discredit, DeSantis mentioned only the Florida equivalent in his remarks, downplaying its federal counterpart. (Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong about this.)

I assume most readers are aware of the Federal agencies mentioned above, but an increasingly important one might be less familiar: the Department of Defense is increasingly dedicated to understanding and responding to the threats posed by climate change and to reducing its own contribution to that change. The point person for those efforts across all branches is Richard Kidd, who currently serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Environment and Energy Resilience. The DoD Climate Portal at WWW.CLIMATE.MIL points to the many facets of this commitment. 

This admittedly bureaucratic response arises from a very clear realization among military planners that coastal bases and other resources are extremely vulnerable to climate change. Moreover, as the largest single consumer of fossil fuels, the U.S. military contributes significantly to those risks. 

How We Survive

Pictured at left is radio host Kai Ryssdal, in a photo taken when he served in the Navy in Norfolk, Virginia in the 1980s. 

I have been listening to him on the program Marketplace for many years. This is essentially the only business and economics program I consider worth listening to. I only learned recently that he has a special interest in the role of the military in climate change, and is in the sixth season of How We Survive, which is a podcast devoted exclusively to this important topic. He suggests that the U.S. military has been devoting some attention to climate change since the 1950s -- before he and I were even born. (We are almost exactly the same age.) 

The Fallout

All of this matters because at the level of national politics, extremists who have been politicizing climate science for a long time are now doing the same with weather science. Some of those who once claimed that humans could not influence climate are claiming that humans are orchestrating weather events. Most notably, Marjorie Taylor Green has claimed that "they" have created recent hurricanes as a political tactic. This rhetoric has been amplified by her party's presidential candidate and has led to ordinary weather forecasters being the brunt of baseless claims and death threats.

For example: Threats against workers in North Carolina 

The tweet referenced above is from MTG 

Meanwhile, Zillow appeals to grownups 

Those who think the Federal response has been lacking should recall Hurricane Maria, when aid was deliberately withheld by then-president Trump. The parallels are striking: I know from personal experience that both Puerto Rico and Western North Carolina are characterized by extremely complex networks of roads and river valleys that make their residents particularly vulnerable to isolation during major storms.