Be Careful What You Meme For

As they are wont to do, a meme's making the rounds that both grossly generalizes and exaggerates an important sociopolitical topic and does nothing but serve its antagonists. The meme claims that a home in an unspecified location cost $230,000 when it was well taken care of in 2009, and a decade later had an asking price of nearly a million after it had been abandoned and fallen into a state of disrepair.

The kicker: "EMPIRE IN DECLINE"

Let's dissect this.

Setting aside the alleged market valuation for this home in 2019, Zillow states it was built in 2007. Its current abandonment is true and can be confirmed in real estate databases. Given this was new construction built just before the housing market crash, its initial asking price could be correct, but its current state is an indictment of that housing market crash, not the current housing crisis.

In all likelihood, the original owner took advantage of pre-Recession predatory lending and abandoned the home when they could no longer make payments, or when the home's tax-value dropped below what they owed. 

If this home were in parts of the West Coast, New Jersey, or Northern Virginia, the current asking price of nearly $1M could easily be believable. But if it were in the Rust Belt, the Midwest, or smaller cities in the South, $1M is a leap. It's actually in Detroit, and it's asking price is a gross exaggeration. The current price listed on Zillow is a mere $15,000, or roughly the cost of a used Kia on Carvana.

All of that is problematic, from the cost of housing in California and Colorado to the price of a ten year old Sorento. But most problematic is the fact that the maker of this meme chose to completely fabricate the scenario, exaggerating the current cost of a home by well over 6000%, when they could have easily made their case using current listings in Portland or Denver.

This sort of false flag does two things that don't help underfunded prospective homeowners: 1) it throws chum to the naysayers who will rightfully call this out as "fake news," but for all the wrong reasons, solidifying their claim that the housing crisis doesn't exist and any reference to it is just bad Photoshop, and 2) it normalizes exaggerated home values well beyond the West Coast and Long Island; it coerces even savvy readers into thinking, "if $989,000 is fake, then $50,000 is pretty damn good," when in reality, its $15,000 asking price is already too high. Detroit's Land Bank should be offering this home for free to anyone willing to make it livable. 

Memes are a quick and easy way to make a point, but unless they're completely factual they can do more harm than good. This meme would have, and could have, been a sturdy case if it had shown abandoned new construction built in pre-Recession Fairfax, VA with a price tag of almost $1M. Instead they chose to lie, either because they were lazy or because they knew lying would make their meme go viral. 

Either way, it does nothing to quell the reality of the current housing crisis.

The Bell Curve of Garbage

When Gertrude Stein returned to Oakland in the 1930s and found her home was gone, she famously quipped, “there is no there there.” It’s hard to imagine what she’d say about the Bay Area today. It’s impossible not to reflect with similar sentimentality when I return home to Virginia. My childhood house is still standing; the barn has collapsed, the land has been subdivided, and a cheap tract home sits where our chickens once roosted in a white out-building reminiscent of a Wyeth painting.

My grandparents recently passed away and their own farm is being eyed by real estate developers. It’s near the heart of Virginia Horse Country, much of which has been absorbed into the lifeless suburbs of Washington, DC. Of course the farm doesn’t need to be developed. It’s a fully capable farm. But there’s nothing historic about it; and today’s working farms are corporate factories with concrete warehouses.

Built in the 1970s, it’s a handsome Colonial reproduction. As a young architectural aficionado I’d sit on the bright shag carpeting of any room comparing the crown molding in my Elements of Design book to the details that circled above, shaded in the colors of the Nixon era: Harvest Gold, Robin’s Egg Blue, Pea Green. To date, the house is a time capsule of a decade quickly becoming history relegated to more books than memory, entirely untouched since it was built. At nearly 4000 square feet, any sane family should consider it more than enough. But today’s families don’t want wainscoting and a formal library; they want endless square footage and an open concept full of stainless steel appliances stretching to the front door.

What will likely happen is what’s happened in my own hometown two hours away where handsome estate houses sit amid the cul de sacs of indistinguishable McMansions that have eaten up their respective farms. Nearby are the cavernous concrete warehouses brandished with Tyson or Perdue. When you enter the idyllically named town of Pleasant Valley you pass its iconic schoolhouse and abandoned train station, but as you turn and approach the crest leaving the quaint village you’re faced with miles and miles of these factory farms belching steam, launching big rigs headed for I-81.

Pleasant Valley’s train station hasn’t seen service in over half a century, nor has the larger station in the nearby city of Harrisonburg. Both will soon receive a makeover with an obligatory coffee shop, maybe a brewery and a weekly farmer’s market filled with the cultivations of upwardly mobile hobbyists. Neither will ever see a train again; the tracks have been stripped for bike trails.

I don’t even need to say the word for you to know what I’m talking about. It’s both lost all meaning and become ubiquitous with America. It doesn’t just happen to our city’s cultural neighborhoods; it is happening to the heritage of an entire nation: the proliferation of sameness, driven by the age of social media and marketing algorithms that mine our data and merchandise mediocrity, coaxing us to strive for the swell of a press-board Bell Curve.

Never resigned to let what works work, we refuse to allow history to live in America. Instead, we memorialize it in historic districts. We don’t have artist colonies; we have loft condominiums named for the artists that once worked in those buildings. We don’t have Black, gay, or ethnic neighborhoods; we have flags adorned with Civil Rights leaders, rainbow crosswalks, and street signs with Chinese characters. We designate our authentic heritage with these tokens to quell the insecurities of those who’d rather forget who they’ve replaced; to tell them authenticity isn’t necessary when diversity has been brandished on a NPS marker. Too few people want to live authentically, and those who do are pummeled into submission by Big Box department stores and fast casual chains. At one time the authentic would flock to the distant corners of this country: Key West, Provincetown, rainy cities like Seattle and San Francisco, or Savannah or Charleston. But this sameness has found its way there too where bloated vacation homes in a style that can only be described as universal overshadow the legacies that the 21st century generation has deemed fit to be salvaged, often restored to unreal geometric perfection. It’s expected; there are no surprises.

These places are great repositories of history, but at best, that’s all they are now. When you start digging into their pasts and considering what it had been like when they were authentic, when they inspired some of America’s truly great early- and mid-century artists and writers, well that’s a sad rabbit hole to fall down. Provincetown’s and Key West’s artistic legacies are million dollar tiny homes and art colonies fashioned out of long unused fishing piers that only the most wealthy can afford to sustain. Once the inspirations for Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Jared and Margaret French, and Paul Cadmus; what now passes for art in these places is motel art doled out by wealthy retirees and, of course, the immediately ephemeral works of Instagram influencers hustling a Lululemon sponsorship.

Today’s society has even sanitized and monetized cultural misfits and ethnic minorities. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is part of a multi-billion dollar franchise studded with millionaire stars being lauded in a MasterCard commercial as a groundbreaking moment in Civil Rights. Drag queens, once raunchy underground performers, are now the stars of reality shows and headliners at children’s birthday parties. In either instance, the authentic realities of those communities are still being ignored. What has MasterCard or Disney done to curb violence towards Black people? What are mothers who hire drag queens like they’re circus clowns doing to challenge the proliferation of laws aimed at banning drag performances altogether?

As always, when authenticity rears its head, neither will even bother to look in the rear-view mirror.

America’s cultural consensus has always been in its status quo, but when the cultural mileposts were authentic, those who had less strived for more, and those who had more were interesting. Now the American Dream is to be a YouTube personality and sell an auto-turned single to Apple Music. It’s an air conditioned summer house where a family can stream Netflix from somewhere else, and the kids can play Minecraft.

A commercial for Kenzie’s song Paper has been running ad nauseam on Hulu. Of course, I had no idea who she was. No one did. That’s why she’s advertising her single during commercial breaks. She’s an 18 year old alum from the television show Dance Moms. The song is aggressively bad: the lyrics, her lack of vocal range, the expressionless look on her face that tells you she’s a child star in the age of social media. I mentioned this to an old college friend who has written music and now writes music with her daughter who has an amazing voice, and she immediately knew what commercial I was talking about. She and her daughter had had their own fits every time it aired. Her daughter will likely have a successful career in academia someday, but she’ll never make the kind of money generic pop stars make because she refuses to sell her soul on TikTok. But what’s worse is, she’ll only ever reach those with an academic interest in music. Because America’s status quo is no longer confronted by authenticity, freshman auditions for music programs are largely spent weeding out prospective students whose relationship with music is limited to American Idol.

Generation after generation, we look back at the past through rosy glasses and lament how much better things were. That hot take is universally criticised because, in many cases, they simply weren’t. But it’s time we start looking at the things that were, particularly art and culture. Well crafted oil paintings languish in gallery windows while bananas duct taped to walls sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. What’s even worse than that mere price tag (and the blatant money laundering in the professional art world) is the attention that these shams absorb. We are headed for an artistic and cultural dark age, if we aren’t already actively entrenched in it. But it’s flipped. While the Dark Ages, at least as they are popularly understood, were a rejection of progressive values finally enlightened by the Renaissance; ours is one driven by a false progressivism set out to look authentic online while pillaging it in the real world. It’s depressing to consider exactly how much worse it can get, but it probably will. After all, we’re no longer in the Wild West of the dot com era, we’re only in its Roaring Twenties.

Hands Off Chinatown

I've heard time and again how the newly proposed Sixers Center City arena at the beleaguered Fashion District Mall would be "good for Chinatown," almost as much as I've heard 10th and Market isn't in Chinatown, and both are equally insulting.

There's this "I know what's good for you" mentality in Philadelphia that has historically driven development in communities that never asked for it, often with questionable outcomes. If a new arena would be so great for business, why aren't any other neighborhoods begging for it in their backyards? Those who NIMBY casinos and stadiums out of their own neighborhoods are often the first to applaud those developments when they're proposed where they don't live.

To say other neighborhoods don't need the proposed arena's injection of business implies there's something wrong with Chinatown. Most scoff that it's a low income area, which isn't completely true or its entire story. It's an immigrant community with as much wealth as poverty. To attempt to lift its built environment to the pedigree of, say Old City, doesn't lift up its residents most in need, it displaces them, a false solution and the foundation of the both hailed and hated g-word.

Chinatown as a neighborhood isn't struggling. In fact, when COVID-19 blasted its way into Philadelphia, Chinatown was the first to respond. As a result, when pandemic-induced shutdowns ran roughshod through our neighborhoods, closing down countless businesses, Chinatown came out the other side bustling as it ever had been, if not more so. Those who claim Chinatown would benefit from an arena's business are either woefully unfamiliar with the neighborhood or, most insidiously, think Chinatown doesn't need more business, they're saying it needs new business, business that caters to a broader and more homogenized Philadelphia. 

Chinatown is more than just business. Like the Gayborhood or the Italian Market, Chinatown is comprised of homes, schools, and churches. In these cultural enclaves, businesses serve as byproducts of their denizens, not tourist attractions. That's not to say they're isolated or unwelcoming, but the dichotomy doesn't help a community's members, it alienates them. What's unwelcome are outsiders trying to alter what works well within community to quell the insecurities and discomfort of those who visit. You wouldn't go into a neighbor's house and start rearranging their furniture the way you like it on the off chance you might stop by again. 

As a community, Chinatown knows the intent behind the support for the Sixers arena more than any other in Philadelphia. The reason the arena's been proposed for 10th and Market is the same reason The Gallery, The Pennsylvania Convention Center, and the Vine Street Expressway were dumped there. 

To city planners and politicos who remember Philadelphia's darkest days, Chinatown is Center City's last perceived remnant of midcentury blight. Once wedged between Skid Row and The Furnished Room District's flophouses, they want it gone. Like the stunning movie theater at 22nd and Market that was completely ignored by preservationists because it had since become a strip club, Chinatown is guilty by its historic association with neighboring red light districts, and City Hall has been trying to eradicate it for 50 years. 

Chinatown, vibrant as it is, is a self-sustained community that hasn't succumbed to the sterilization and organization of redevelopment. That in itself should be enough to tell everyone else to leave it alone, especially in this era of progressively woke cultural awareness. But this is a 21st century American city, and xenophobia has managed to ferret its way into the most self-righteously progressive circles. In today's Philadelphia, anything that doesn't cater exclusively to the status quo must be reinvented, even when the status quo has literally everywhere else to eat craft burgers, drink local brews, and drop $50 on a candle making class. 

Despite the fact that all efforts to tame Chinatown's authenticity have been abject failures (see the aforementioned Gallery mall, Pennsylvania Convention Center, and Vine Street Expressway), City Hall is still willing to capitalize on the idea of Chinatown, as long as it becomes anything it never was. Like the rainbow street signs that cropped up throughout the Gayborhood just before it was callously renamed "Midtown Village," City Hall and the Sixers will undoubtedly flood the area with all the dragon-branded trappings of what anyone shopping for a Mogwai might expect to find when searching for a stock photo of "Chinatown." 

Look at DC if you want to see the future of our Chinatown: garishly stereotypical fanfare bordering on the offensive, fast casual chain restaurants, and a few authentic holdouts wedged between a Starbucks and a Smashburger like the lingering apartment house at the end of Batteries Not Included. 

It's either ironically aloof or deliberately hypocritical that those who support this Sixers arena are quick to point out that 10th and Market isn't technically Chinatown, right after rhetorically pondering why Chinatown doesn't want its business. Google Maps might not place 10th and Market within the confines of Chinatown's official borders, but after being boxed in by an expressway and the sterile walls at the ass end of a convention center, Chinatown's had nowhere else to grow. Early renderings for the Fashion District's redesign even show Chinese imagery illuminating the ceiling of its 10th Street underpass. The city, and those championing the Sixers arena, know very well that 10th and Market isn't just part of Chinatown, it's its gateway.  

The Sixers Center City arena might be great for business, but only those antithetical of everything Chinatown is. What's more, once Ocean Harbor and Four Rivers become a P.F. Chang's and a Panda Express, those who pushed for the Sixers arena will be lamenting the loss of one of North America's last great Chinatowns, a loss at their behest. And aside from mega-cities like Chicago or New York where downtown real estate is so valuable they're forced to build as densely as possible, America has repeatedly set precedents that downtown arenas do nothing positive for the neighborhoods they encroach upon. Even in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Convention Center not only obliterated dozens of historic properties to make way for its presence, its expansion continues to eat away at what's left of the west side of Chinatown for its asphalt prairies, plaguing its lingering residents with noise from conventioneers who treat Camac Street like a suburban Walmart parking lot. When no large conventions are being held there, it's a ghost town.

Philadelphia might be booming on paper, but it has no shortage of developable real estate. The Sixers could have proposed an arena as part of the emerging Schuylkill Yards or Penn's Landing's waterfront redevelopment without upending a community. But City Hall and the echo chamber of those who don't live in Chinatown and rarely visit have hypocritically deemed this locale most fit, all because this neighborhood refuses to bend to their pressboard idea of 21st century American urbanism.

From the Gayborhood to Fishtown, from Spruce Hill to the Italian Market, this city has spent the last half century trying to eradicate anything culturally unique while claiming to be one of the nation's most diverse cities. There's isn't a more eloquently deserved word for this but "gross." 

Of course all of this should be moot. Ignore the bevy of land available for an arena along the Delaware River or atop the Schuylkill Yards (dare I even mention the mythical "Bellweather District" at the demolished Sunoco plant that will likely rival Chernobyl as a superfund site well into the 21st century?), and there's a perfectly great neighborhood surrounded by ample parking right on a subway line where a new Sixers arena won't bother anyone. And that's exactly where it is. 

What is Art?

Several years ago a friend of mine in San Francisco was complaining about “another classic car show” taking up space. I was instantly jealous. Not only was a car show set up in his neighborhood, but to see one in California, the capital of car culture, and in a city as wealthy as San Francisco? I can only imagine what amazing feats of artistry and engineering he was taking for granted. 

But his gripe also stuck with me, and it periodically rears its ugly head, particularly when one of my more artistically minded friends takes a swat at car culture. 

Stout Scarab

Automotive design is one of the most ignored, if not one of the most maligned art forms. When Maurizio Cattelan taped a banana to a wall, critics lined up to gawk at his outsider work of art. But when tons of gracefully bent steel and chrome are displayed on the streets of a major American city - for free - those same critics brush it aside as a problematic product celebrating traffic jams and climate change. The men and women who restore priceless pieces at the Philadelphia Museum of Art are revered as artisans. Mechanics are "grease monkeys."  

1948 Timbs Buick Streamliner

It’s true, art serves solely to inspire. And while the Stout Scarab and the Phantom Corsair are certainly inspirational, cars are first and foremost tools that take us from one point to another. It’s hard to consider automotive design an art form when your primary reference point is a parking lot full of indistinguishable crossovers. But it’s difficult to say how many art academics are aware of the Jonckheere Phantom or the Timbs Streamliner because there’s a willful ignorance in the traditional art world when it comes to artistic genres that blend artistry and purpose.

On the first day of my 10th grade art class, my teacher picked up a Swingline stapler and said, "everything is art". No statement has ever been truer. 

Jonckheere Phantom, or "Round Door Rolls"

It’s hard to ignore the political influences. The art world is significantly Left leaning while the automotive lobby is staunchly on the Right side of the political spectrum. But that’s not a complete assessment of either realm. Popular automotive outlets like Autopian and Jalopnik are considerably woke, and while galleries and museums might benefit from Left leaning initiatives, Republicans are avid art collectors. Still, both are propelled by the stereotypes of their perceived alignments. Trump paraphernalia is in no short supply at neighborhood car shows and the Concours oozes old money conservatism.

 

That’s unfortunate.

Phantom Corsair

Public art museums should be repositories of inspiration to be enjoyed by the masses, and the designs of Giorgetto Giugiaro and John Z. DeLorean should be held to the same esteem as the works of Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. Sadly, in a world of growing polarization that traffics in pigeonholing people into undeserved buckets, art people are “smart” and car people are “stupid.” That’s not fair. To quote Puddy from Seinfeld, “I don’t know too many monkeys that can take apart a fuel injector.”

A Candlelight Tribute to...Taylor Swift?

Nothing fiddles while Rome burns quite like a candlelit tribute to mediocrity atop a school shutdown for gentrification's bird's eye view of the city it set ablaze. 

Satire is dead, folks. Not even Tina Fey could write a joke this good.

Homophobia Shut Down 12th Street Gym

If I were to tell you there was a fitness center in the heart of the city that had a swimming pool, racquetball court, basketball court, sauna, sun deck, about ten thousand square feet of gym equipment, and sprawling classrooms for endless free classes, you'd think I was crazy. If I told you it cost about $29 a month, came with two free training sessions, seven individual guest passes, all without the nefarious upsell and membership cancellation practices of corporate gyms, you'd have me committed. 

But it did exist, for nearly three decades, and it finally closed its doors because New Philadelphians and Millennials have turned Philadelphia into a hot-bed of pro-corporate snobbery. 

From the outside, 12th Street Gym is unassuming. The only thing indicating it's more than a warehouse along the Gayborhood's 12th Street Strip is the stunning mural of LGBT rights activist, Gloria Casarez. Once a gay bathhouse - community code for a den of anonymous sex - the gym had a hard time shaking its former reputation. Many straight men and women no doubt avoided the notion of joining a "gay gym," while gay men scoffed at the connotation it carried, all despite its bevy of services and modest membership price. Nonetheless, it catered to over 4000 active members, many dedicated for a long time. I'd been a member myself since I moved to Philadelphia in 2004. When 12th Street Gym closed, I declined the extended membership offered for Philadelphia Sports Club, and like so many others, opted for Optimal Sports Health Club nearby at Walnut and Juniper. 

Optimal is a fine facility, casually referred to as "the other gay gym." The day after 12th Street closed, Optimal was taxed with a barrage of new members. Underestimating just how many would reject PSC's offer, Optimal quickly annexed an additional 800 square feet of space. Still, the gym is small, roughly the size of one of 12th Street's many floors. It's practical. There is no common space, no juice bar, and it's tucked down a small street. Once again, like so many LGBT venues in Philadelphia, the community has been hidden from plain site. 

What made 12th Street Gym so popular with those of us who embraced it, and the very reason we sought out Optimal in lieu of PSC, is that it was more than a fitness center, it was the Gayborhood's community center. With more and more mainstream development expanding throughout the neighborhood, with developers adopting the phrase "Midtown Village" beyond the confines of 13th and Chestnut, it's not hard to feel the pangs of gentrification. We need places like 12th Street Gym, places to gather beyond booze and hookups. I like Optimal, but it isn't one of those places. 

"Midtown Village" itself, though it started merely as a business collective along the once-beleaguered 13th Street, is a concept met with understandable reservation within the LGBT community. Real estate agents use the term to sell and rent apartments to those who might be skittish about living in a "gay ghetto." You wouldn't be hard-pressed to overhear a few sipping mimosas at Green Eggs Cafe, even cocktails at Woody's, espouse how the neighborhood is changing without a hint of dismay. 

Indeed it is changing.

Woody's, once Philadelphia's go-to gay bar, is now avoided by local LGBT individuals: it caters to bridal parties on some sort of safari. 

While this change may be good for developers, it's not for a still-marginalized community. Exposed by the apparent connotation in the word "Gayborhood," a brand only whispered by heterosexual newcomers, is a latent underlying homophobia more dangerous than arbitrary protesters at a Pride parade. Why? Well it's hard to know your enemy when they're self-professed liberals from Park Slope who don't want to admit they don't want you around their kids. 

This discrimination would be far more apparent were developers renaming the Italian Market. What would it say about race if real estate agents began referring to Chinatown as "East Market Village" because, for some reason, they had a hard time moving condos in an ethnic enclave? But that's exactly what's happening in the Gayborhood, and it's going unchecked. 

12th Street Gym had financial problems, that's very true. Several years ago, the Department of Licenses and Inspections slapped them with a fine for inadequate fire doors necessitating $500,000 in renovations. However, as I was getting my hair cut at Rossi's next to the gym shortly after it closed, I was talking about those exact problems with several former members and my barber, and it became clear that the gym easily could have crowd-funded the money needed to remain open. $500,000 is by no means a small sum, but the LGBT community is by no means loose. Thanks to dealing with a whole lot of shit, we're a tight group that comes to the aid of one another. In a few years, even a few months, we could have raised the funds. I would have gladly pitched in one of those thousands. 

The truth is, 12th Street Gym didn't fit in with what the city is becoming. The gym didn't close when it failed to meet L&I's standards, it closed when a development company from New York purchased the property. No doubt two lawsuits regarding a handsy massage therapist didn't help matters, but the second lawsuit was incredibly sketchy. In a facility as large as 12th Street Gym, and one that had been open for so long, these unfortunate cases happen. That's why gyms, therapists, and trainers pay massive insurance premiums. 

None of this would have closed 12th Street Gym a decade ago. L&I's fire safety standards haven't changed that substantially, if at all in the last ten years. But L&I and other city agencies have been working at the behest of gentrification, targeting locally owned businesses and granting passes to the corporate conglomerates that fall in line with developers' largest profits. It wouldn't be hard to imagine Midwood Corporation flipping the bill for $500,000 in renovations if they could land a corporate tenant like Planet Fitness, or something more marketable to the "Midtown Village" set. 12th Street Gym just didn't fit the mold of newcomers, and the L&I violations and lawsuits proved worthy scapegoats to shut the place down. In 2018, gay owned and operated businesses still carry a stigma amid the happy couples pushing baby carriages through "Midtown Village." And that's profoundly sad for those of us not born with the privilege of being "normal."  

The Status Quo of Optimization

Among all the "four letter words" the internet age has wrought, none may be as underhandedly ugly as "optimization." Among the obnoxious buzzwords pouring out of cubicle pools, it's far from the newest. But it reigns over every facet of today's corporate realm, public or private, as a positive way to maximize profits, but because it's so complicatedly metric-driven it's hard to explain the damage it does to the spirit of product development and design in a sentence or two. 

When I joined the ranks of information technology nerds in the late 1990s, the internet was the Wild West. It was also merely supplemental, like a telephone or answering machine. It didn't run our lives, it simply enhanced it. The first wave, you might say, of the Technological Revolution was rooted in this simplicity. The internet just made lives a little more convenient. Optimization wasn't central to development. Graphic designers designed interfaces and product experts made decisions based on experience. Today, let's call it the second wave, or post-boom, development is driven not by experts but optimization: algorithms that determine exactly what will sell the most units, and in many cases keep you engaged with a product as long as possible. 

We binge, and profits soar. 

The good ol' days

The problem, though, with optimization is that it doesn't build optimal products, only optimal profits. When you eschew designers and experts for algorithms and metrics, you're merely seeking to reach the largest audience. And the largest audience is squarely in the middle of the Bell Curve. It's average, the status quo, not good or bad but too boring to really note. Take Netflix, for example. The online streaming service put nearly all brick-and-mortar video stores out of business. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, just marketplace evolution brought by invention. But over the last year, in the name of optimization, Netflix's content has gone unarguably downhill. There are diamonds in the rough like Stranger Things and Arrested Development, but rather than pay for the rights to great movies, their catalog of full of oddball foreign films, found footage b-movies, and hoards of forgettable television shows that users will binge watch because nothing else is available. It's right to point out that Amazon owns the market for online movie rentals, but it's also true that Netflix abandoned its unique model for the status quo of optimization.

So what's this got to do with architecture and urban planning? Well, architecture, like everything else, has joined the optimization movement. The most notable examples in Philadelphia would be Toll Brothers and OCF Realty, where sturdy and unique buildings are demolished for cheap construction not built to last. Rather than convert landmarks like the Society Hill Playhouse, the Royal Theater, the Boyd, Frankford Chocolate Factory, and countless 19th Century row homes for a handsome return, profits are optimized by metrics dictating low-cost construction. Our modern culture has been so groomed to not only tolerate it, but desire sameness squarely within the status quo. 

Cheapness is in vogue. 

Built to last as long as a tax abatement

This has been going on in the suburbs for decades, one might even say since the suburbs were invented with Levittowns. Today, McMansions are the status quo of desirability, symbols of wealth and status that ironically fail to stand out among the crowds of sameness. It's as if the housing market's target audience wants to display a status symbol while blending in. Keeping Up With the Jones's is an exercise in futility when you're either afraid to stand out or live within your means. Urban centers used to be a reprieve from such pointless efforts, but the trend is tiptoeing back downtown. Once home to the opulent excess of the Gilded Age and Roaring 20s, each mansion more grand and storied than the last, followed by eight decades of artistic Bohemian diversity, cities are now full of cheap construction, canned design, and flash-in-the-pan businesses that will never survive long enough to become institutions. 

You'll re-think this investment the first time you need to replace that massive roof.

Architecture, too, suffers as much as the urban planning and business concepts, and not just in the cases of press-board row homes clad in plastic and metal panels paraded as some sort of "modernism." The most lauded skyscrapers pale in comparison to the landmark limestone towers of the early 20th Century, even some mid-century Brutalist examples. For well over twenty years, glass curtains have been the optimal status quo. Some critics and architects might argue that the use of blue glass is intended to allow the building's height to blend in with the sky. But that's a cop out, and unnecessary. Why would a company spend upwards of a billion dollars to build something that fails to make a statement? You wouldn't spend $5000 on a wedding dress that looks like every other dress in the crowd. The reality is, glass is the optimal alternative to stone and brick and the employment of a curtain is an affordably chic way to cut the cost of designing anything more dynamic. 

In places like New York and other skyscraper-heavy cities, there's little incentive to truly stand out when the most basic design is financially optimal. It's also not hard to stand out when the bar has been driven so low. 

Of course all of this may be coming to a head, and a lot of that has to do with the unrealistic profits demanded by optimization, especially within publicly traded companies. It also has to do with our unsustainable disposable society. When million dollar homes built by companies like Toll Brothers begin to fall apart, the market may begin demanding quality over excess. Everything from smartphones to cars are built to be discarded and planned obsolescence can't last forever. Likewise, there will come a point where there are simply no profits left to meet quarterly goals. 

This happened in some small part during the last Recession and on an unprecedented scale in the Great Depression. If history repeats itself, and given the election of a neo-Herbert Hoover, it is, the Technological Revolution will end very much like its Industrial counterpart in 1929. That's not bad, though. Like the late stages of the Industrial Revolution, optimization has come to replace innovation. We're not inventing anything but perpetual and exponential profits. 

Our society has become more financially polarized than any era since the Roaring 20s. The waste of our excess is unchecked. When the market inevitably collapses it may hit harder than it did in the 1930s, but we'll be forced to recon with our disposable society, economic polarization, and the fast-fashion way we attack architecture and corporate design in general. Quality and optimization can't go hand in hand, but quality can be forced by financial hardship where longevity becomes necessity. We might build smaller and live more simply, but we'll re-learn an appreciation for history and building things to last. We'll also be forced to reject optimization's cheap and boring status quo. The next Depression will be rough, but it will bring welcomed change. 

More Historic Loss in the Midst of Preservation Month

After this month's demolition of the historic Frankford Chocolate Factory, thanks to an endless array of loopholes within the city's preservation-dedicated agencies, another element of mismanagement has allowed the same developer, Ori Feibush of OCF Realty, to demolish the Christian Street Baptist Church. 

In this instance, this Historical Commission voted 5-4 to protect the 19th Century Italianate church with two abstentions. It's those abstentions that allowed the church to remain unprotected despite a vote in favor. As it turned out, the Department of Planning and Development requires the Historical Commission to grant at least six votes in order to protect a building. This all happened nearly six months ago, and since then no re-vote has been cast. 

Chalk one more up to the nation's first World Heritage City in the midst of Preservation Month. It's curious why two of the Historical Commission's members declined to vote. After all, they're the primary body responsible for making these sometimes tough decisions.

Did those two members just not bother showing up?

Feibush, who paid $1.5M for the property, briefly held out in search of a buyer willing to convert the church into apartments. It certainly wouldn't be unheard of. There are a number of converted churches in the city and surrounding areas and they make breathtaking living spaces, some fetching much higher prices than newly constructed town homes. Feibush even offered to let the property go for $1M, but claims no offers were made.

In the wake of the demolition of the Frankford Chocolate Factory and other properties razed by Feibush and OCF Reality, this all sounds a little sketchy. Though it seems Feibush extended an olive branch after his much-criticized demolition of the factory (which reminded many he also demolished the Royal Theater), he only extended that offer for a month. As of Thursday, demolition was back on, with hopes to quickly ready the site for two buildings comprised of eight apartments.

Like the factory and the Royal Theater, this speaks to the erratic fashion under which Feibush conducts business. Unlike developers with firm project plans, i.e. Carl Dranoff and Eric Blumenfeld, Feibush targets threatened sites, moves quickly and confusingly. Before the dust settles, he's often erected one of his superfluously cardboard carbon copies and preservationists are left scratching their heads, wondering what exactly just happened before he's moved on to his next idea. This is characteristic of a developer who once ran for City Council which, would he have won, would have imposed massive conflicts-of-interest were he ever to sign the death warrant of a property he stood to profit from. 

But as it currently exists, Feibush and OCF Realty function within the confines of the law, however unethically they may exploit the spirit of it. Why can't Feibush himself convert the Christian Street Baptist Church into four or six unique apartments? He might not see the same expansive profit of a tear-down replaced with cheap construction, but he'd easily make back his investment. As many noted while he began razing the Frankford Chocolate Factory, residential conversion of these urban properties was the status quo in the 1980s and '90s, most notably in Callowhill's lofts. 

OCF Realty seems to have found a loyal and steady flow of income in Millennials and New Philadelphians who don't really understand Philadelphia's history, or care to. 

While neighbors ferociously opposed Feibush's plans for Christian Street, their opposition was almost exclusively surrounding (you guessed it) parking. It's a just complaint. While the site would get eight cars off the street, it would bring eight cars to an already congested and car-heavy part of town, all a few blocks from a subway and next to several major bus routes. However, given that the church is not technically under any historic protection, arguments regarding parking may have been the pragmatic way to make a case for saving a beautiful old building and neighborhood landmark. 

None of this matters so long as Feibush owns the church. Anyone remotely familiar with development in Philadelphia is aware of Feibush's nefarious track record for sameness crammed with "luxury" amenities. McMansionHell could franchise a subsidiary dedicated to piss-poor post-post-modern urban architecture without ever straying from OCF Realty's website. 

Feibush and other one-trick ponies like Toll Brothers don't have a vested interest in Philadelphia that doesn't solely benefit their bottom lines. Preservation isn't as profitable as new construction, it never will be. This is exactly why we have organizations like the Historical Commission, the Preservation Task Force, and the Register of Historic Places. They are the gates between history and profit-blinded development. 

Hope for preservation can't exist when those charged with protecting history aren't willing to do their jobs, or bother to do something as simple as vote. In Philadelphia, preservation currently only exists in hindsight, and in those of us who can do nothing but look at falling buildings and shake our heads. Currently we're seeing a level of historic loss not seen since the post-war demolition spree responsible for some of the city's largest urban voids: Dock Street, Penn's Landing, Vine Street. By now, we should know better. 

Shop Local

In the wake of Starbucks' 911 call that led to a perp walk of two innocent black men, the company has taken to an apology tour, an in-person meeting between their CEO and those arrested, and shutting down for a day to conduct obligatory sensitivity training. But if you followed Chipotle's embarrassing diarrhea fiasco or Facebook's less-than-grueling two days in front of the Senate, you can certainly spot a trend: feign shock from the top down, promise future accountability, and keep an apologetically low profile during Twitter's 48 hour attention span.

Wash, rinse, repeat. 

I have to wonder when the general public's patience for the corporate excuse-mill will begin to wane. Or if, in the age of rapid-fire social media, the past's inability to instantaneously expose all ill-repute has simply been traded for our collective 21st Century ADD. 

A month later, does anyone but those afflicted remember that this even happened? No doubt The Onion is already drafting satirical replies to Starbucks' closure on the 29th #FML #ThisIsTheWorstThingThatsEverHappenedToAnyone.

Aside from recent gun reform debates that went on for an unprecedented month, I can't remember a post-smartphone boycott that lasted for more than a few days. Stocks inevitably fall for a few hours, but the cycle has been so normalized that even Facebook's value managed to surge while the Silicon Valley's prodigal son was testifying before Washington. 

Wall Street owns our outrage, even when it's directed at them. 

Shareholders know that corporate remorse is designed to benefit themselves, and it's time we begin to recon with this, and what it means as consumers and suppliers. 

Public corporations (pick one) function under business models layered far more insidiously than simple bigotry as the street knows it, and treating the symptoms that expose themselves the way they did at Starbucks is akin to bandaging a malignant tumor. The response - be it Starbucks' apology, Chipotle's investigation and blame-game, or whatever Southwest decides to do about the commercial airline industry's first death in almost a decade - is always a measured calculation backed up by data that proves it won't just repair its stock price and image, but actually advance it.

We expect this from politicians, but when perceived ideologue CEOs tout the same modus operandi, brand loyalists continually return to freely advertise their products by literally wearing and carrying their logos. 

"They've learned" and "they're actually better now" become the aftermath's rally cry from consumers who either don't want to kick the habit of their guilty pleasures or are afraid to admit they ever shopped somewhere so blind-sidedly money-minded in the first place. In the end, inevitable Starbucks apologists (among others) will sound like religious Trump-supporters excusing his extra-marital affairs. We all know better, but continue to embrace whatever is offered up so long as it supports our fractured ideals or ability to be as lazy as humanly possible. 

Any "good liberal" wants to assume Starbucks is a good company. They offer benefits to part-time employees and pay more than the minimum wage. But we ignore the fact that these decisions themselves are also the results of pre-packaged analytics that have invented an infallibly profitable model.

Remember those dastardly deeds carried out by Facebook's partner in crime, Cambridge Analytica? They don't exclusively apply to "free" ad driven companies like Facebook and Twitter. Starbucks analyzes the very same type of information. It's gathered through in-app purchases, registered gift cards, and social media, then used to determine what it needs to maintain its customers and grow.

In the realm of public corporations, we're more than customers, we're extensions of their products. Companies like Starbucks continue making money off us long after we've walked out the door.

If the Senate was really interested in (or understood how to) put the kibosh on Facebook's ill repute, one would have suggested banning targeted advertising altogether. 

Most would like to think we shop ethically by supporting companies that seem to support us back. But public companies don't have a social consciousness. Companies that offer unisex dressing rooms and wedding cards for same-sex couples don't do so at the behest of LGBT equality, only popular opinion and how it can be monetized.

Just watch as the outcry over gun reform and school shootings returns to a stable baseline and you'll see the banks and retailers who promised they'd block the purchase and sale of AR-15s back away from the subject or ignore they ever made such statements in the first place, none of which were very specific to begin with. 

The only business you can trust is the one you know. Whole Foods isn't expensive because it's healthy, it's expensive because it's fostered a clientele that assumes anything affordable is unhealthy. Does anyone really think Jeff Bezos is worth $119 billion because he wants his customers to reap the health benefits of kale?

Likewise, Starbucks has strategically weighed the pros and cons of catering to a niche, and whether their bottom line dictates change or it's more profitable to just weather the storm.

The sad truth is, this Starbucks has long been known locally as the "racist Starbucks" and that's never been formally addressed. Something about these two men didn't sit well with the manager and by extension, the clientele her company caters to. That doesn't inspire a lot of hope that anything will be remedied on May 29th but Starbucks' stock value; then it can return to the status quo. 

Like any massive company, Starbucks can always play it off by pointing out their "diverse" staff and clientele, but let's not tiptoe around the obvious: no Starbucks looks like the crowd at Dunkin' Donuts, and Starbucks doesn't want it to. 

Black, white, Indian, Asian, gay, trans, Hispanic...Starbucks customers are of a certain demographic, apparent tax-bracket, and a look that is colloquially "white." The police were called on these two men because they were black, and the thin racial veil that Starbucks (et. al.) surfs under is every bit as deplorable, if not more, than textbook black-and-white racism. 

The fact that Starbucks claims arbitrary training will somehow eradicate racial bias among its 238,000 employees isn't just disingenuous, it's offensive. If erasing 241 years of institutionalized American racism were as easy as a poorly produced corporate video and a jam session with Linda in human resources, we'd all go through it in elementary school and I wouldn't be writing this. 

To Starbucks, and any corporation that gets caught with its pants down, this isn't about social progress. It's about their bottom line. Blatantly bigoted events like this should be used to explore why businesses are obligated to welcome everyone. Instead, they're used to advertise a brand's image as inclusive and compassionate while explaining to managers how much money each specific minority spends in their stores per annum. 

Doing otherwise would negate the bottom line. They've gamed the process so well that they know exactly how to spin the worst press into free publicity. 

Starbucks has long established itself as classist, at best. They have "a look." It behooves their investors to expect this mentality of their customers, and manifests itself when franchisees call the cops on people who don't blend in. If they openly catered to the demographics of a roadside gas station, i.e. everyone, they might lose the honey pot of self-righteously woke customers who excuse their own covert racism by re-Tweeting YouTube videos of Beyonce at Coachella. 

Handing your money over to Wall Street darlings shouldn't be second nature, only a necessary evil that comes with credit cards and cable. In cities like Philadelphia, especially, brand loyalty should be the realm of local chains like Saxby's and La Colombe, and even then only when owner-operated businesses aren't available.

Shop local - Green Street, Last Drop, Square One - only then can you really know why you should, or shouldn't, support a business. By the time any company has ballooned to the size of Starbucks, it's nothing but under-vetted employees operating within a vacuum of data points telling them exactly how to keep Wall Street happy. And how prejudiced they're allowed, or need, to be. Any apology, response, or sensitivity protocol is every bit as soulless as this profitability matrix because each is merely a cog in exactly that machine. 

No one needed to wait for two peaceful black men to get handcuffed in a Starbucks to find a reason to avoid a corporate chain. Our default setting should be supporting our neighbors, not Wall Street. I'm not sure when that became such an impossible idea. 

What to Do About Philadelphia Magazine

In Ashley Primis's article, "What to Do About South Street," Philadelphia Magazine does what it does best: pose a question nobody asked and then spend a whole bunch of words complaining about the magazine's namesake. If the title rings familiar, it's not unlike Annie Monjar's 2011 tone deaf piece, "Do We Really Still Need Eastern State Penitentiary?," where another transplant ruthlessly berated one of the nation's most revered historic landmarks. If either's arrogant unfamiliarity with Philadelphia also sounds familiar, you've likely read Ernest Owens' regular rants about the city's LGBT community and a neighborhood Primis herself once referred to as "the former Gayborhood" without a hint of remorse. 

All part of a cynicism that's become disturbingly common in Philadelphia Magazine, it's certainly worth noting that none of these three writers are native to the Philadelphia area. It's not as though journalists aren't welcome to cover subjects they aren't intimately familiar with, but hit-jobs are usually reserved for those rooted in the subject matter. Otherwise they can sound ignorant at best or prejudiced at worst. For example, Owens has spent a number of his stories criticizing events and venues he boycotts. 

Ironically, shortly after lauding South Street's uncharacteristically posh new venues and making some comment about lattes, Primis gushes about her first experiences on South Street, claiming - accurately - that one "couldn't build something like South Street today." She then begrudgingly likens to strip to an aging rocker, specifically Keith Richards, who might be the human embodiment of the street, now or thirty years ago. 

The article is weird. Primis waxes and wanes between an appreciation for the street's past and vitriol, even copping to her own unfamiliarity with a street she's lived on for ten years. Perplexing, she lands on saving the street's inherent grit by essentially turning it into a kid-friendly shopping mall with a grocery store. Fun. 

While it's true South Street has seen better days, it's also seen worse. Like many neighborhoods once emblematic of Philadelphia's Bohemian mid-century past, it's facing the growing pains of a city on the rise. But the knee jerk reaction to treat it as the status quo and propose stuffing it with upscale boutiques selling $900 jackets only provides residents and tourists with more of the same. South Street could use an injection of new businesses, but treating it with the same canned response employed everywhere from Kensington to Passyunk Square, or suggesting some sort of cohesive makeover, strips away an eclectic appeal formed through decades of urban evolution. 

It's also shortsighted because, as opposed to the aforementioned neighborhoods, South Street isn't necessarily outdated, just not Philadelphia Magazine's apparent cup of tea. But that is the exact problem with the magazine's flawed take on Philadelphia, and gentrification in general. South Street thrives in the summertime and sees no shortage of business during the winter months. It's a destination attraction drawing people from all over the world, and they seem to like it. It's the sole locale for Baby Boomers, the bane of gentrifiers and the ilk writing for Philadelphia Magazine, to find a concert from their youth without hoofing it out to York County. 

What's troubling about Philadelphia Magazine's sort of commentary is that, in a city of a million and a half residents, and a massive geographical footprint for the mid-Atlantic, there's seemingly no room to leave something that hasn't failed well enough alone. 

South Street will hardly be the first casualty of this urban dementia. Nearby, the Gayborhood might appear to be thriving with its abundance of bars and restaurants, but the LGBT community itself has been scattered throughout the region by sky rocketing rents and corporate chains. Recently, 12th Street Gym, a vast and wildly popular business that was as much an LGBT community center as a fitness center, was forced to close after being purchased by a New York-based developer and targeted by the Department of Licenses and Inspections. When the luxury apartment building Commonwealth 1201 opened, the Mazonni Center left the Gayborhood for Bainbridge Street. The Italian Market too may soon see its own luxury apartment development at the corner of 9th and Washington, inevitably altering a unique streetscape that still retains the provincial aesthetic from some of the nation's earliest immigrants, catering alongside some of our most recent. 

Most unnerving in Primis's assessment is her awe inspired witness to the reclamation of, among other areas, the Gayborhood's re-branded "Midtown Village." Coupled with her former jab at the Gayborhood, I can't help but read the thinly veiled homophobia shared by so many neo-liberals who desperately want to appear progressive while harboring resentment for anything that doesn't cater exclusively to their brand. "Midtown Village" reclaimed the LGBT community's safe space for a bunch of homophobic frat boys and real estate agents who know their clients are too covertly bigoted to buy condos in a neighborhood with the word "gay" in its name. 

With so many costly and already-posh neighborhoods straddling the river, where does this gut instinct to terraform every last square foot of real estate in the name of sameness come from? With an almost hostile disdain for anything not clad in glass, plastic, and steel; sanitized to suburban perfection, one has to wonder why those moving to Philadelphia in droves ever bothered to move somewhere so oddball in the first place if not to simply bully a bunch of weirdos into submission like they did in the high school cafeteria where they once reigned supreme. 

South Street is an institution. It's empty storefronts could be filled with something far more dynamic than more restaurants. Our foodie scene once rivaled some of the world's best, but an influx of high-end poverty appropriation - fancy tacos and french fries - has turned a scene once brimming with quality and panache into one that's exhaustively cliche. Instead, the evolution that South Street demands is one reflective of its past: art stores, tattoo parlors, shops packed with oddities, and lots and lots of color. What's wrong with head shops and districts that cater to those not shoving $2000 baby carriages through our narrow sidewalks? Primis points out the diversity of the South Street strip - diversity that can be hard to find commingling in Philadelphia - but her pitch to turn it into a destination for the spendthrift threatens to make it about as "white" as Starbucks on a Monday.  

This is the Philadelphia Philadelphia Magazine wants, despite hiring Chicago muckraker Ernest Owens to challenge its straight, white image of yoga and beer gardens. 

Misunderstanding this, not to mention taking aim at nearly everything that defines Philadelphia as something apart from a New York borough, has made Philadelphia Magazine the least Philadelphian local outlet, and continues to prove that it's incapable of shedding its notoriously banal past. Not only do the magazine's contributors not get Philadelphia, they simply don't want to. Unfortunately they speak for a voluminous influx of new residents who never liked Philadelphia much to begin with, and came to remake it in their own boring image. Sameness is the enemy of diversity and what once made cities great. Why is Philadelphia, and its namesake magazine, defiantly embracing the most basic elements that ruined New York, San Francisco, and Seattle?