Pretty in the City

Fairmount Park is one of my very favorite places in the whole wide world.  I believe it is the largest urban park in the world, and I'm sure it's one of the prettiest.  I usually bike to it because it's a good six miles away from our house, and since I haven't biked in awhile I haven't been to Fairmount Park for awhile.  But work let out early and my wife was at her sister's with our daughter, so I decided to dust off the old two-wheeler and immerse myself in some green.

 

It had probably been eight months since I was last there, and thus this was the first time I had gone since we became parents.  So there was even more of a sense of freedom and exhilaration biking the rocky path alongside the Wissahickon Creek.  When I got to one of my favorite vista points to stop and stare, it was as if my breath was taken away – and not from huffing and puffing for almost an hour.  I had forgotten just how pretty the park is.  I recalled all the other times I'd been to that very spot, sometimes because I had a big decision to make, and other times because I was down and needed a pick-up. 

 

I always left with a clearer head and a better perspective.  And so it was today.  I'll have to get into better shape so I can make this journey more often, for Fairmount Park is a really pretty part of my city.

Running Through Philadelphia

I maintain that one of the best ways to get to know a city is to run around in it.  Literally.  Lucky for me that Philadelphia is a relatively dense city; even without the oppressive heat, I'd long exhaust myself before I got halfway across sprawling cities like Houston or Phoenix.  Not so with Philadelphia, whose downtown is especially easy to criss-cross because of its compact nature.

Two runs I enjoyed this month typify what you might learn from running through Philadelphia.  The first was during my usual, early-morning time window, trying desperately to get a few miles in before my daughter wakes up so my wife can sleep in a little.  But early for me is late for someone else: a drunk guy teetered toward me as soon as I had gotten onto a main road, only to harmlessly hopscotch his way past me once we neared.  It was the morning after Spring Fling, a week-long party on the PENN campus, and if ever a scene symbolized the concept of "after," this was it: trash strewn everywhere, a few groups of college kids straggling home, and that unmistakable stench of day-after alcohol. 

The rest of the run was much more sedate: at this hour, hardly anyone is up, so you see the city as if it were deserted.  It is a fun time of the day to be out and about downtown, as you see the familiar sites, but with no one else around to muddy up the scenery.  So there is a serenity and a simplicity to the views you get.  It is as though, like individual people, the city itself is awaking.

Another run I did this month was in the late evening, an unusual time of the day for me to be running.  But I was glad for the change of pace, for I did the exact same route as the first run, but the vibe could not be more different.  People were out walking, the outdoor seating at restaurants was packed to the gills, and outdoor musicians provided the audio background.  It was as though the entire city was dancing, rhythmically and confidently.

I was running at an hour that I am often already asleep, so it was fun to remember that while I might usually be asleep by now, the rest of the city was most assuredly not sleeping.  And though I don't often enjoy this pulsating energy, I'm glad I live in a city that has a downtown that does.

City Lovers Have Lost a Prophet / The Art and Science of Urban Planning / Six Books for One Philadelphia

This post may end up being shorter than its title.  I can't help it, I had three ideas today and I'm melding them all together, so I felt it deserved three titles. 

Yesterday, Jane Jacobs passed away.  If I had to pick the next "One Book, One Philadelphia," it would be her seminal 1961 work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  Discounted at the time because it was written by a woman, and an under-degreed one at that, it has stood the test of time.  Her critique of post-WWII urban planning, characterized by aesthetically bland skyscrapers and rigidly segregationist zoning, has found a new voice in the modern New Urbanist movement, which extols Jacobsian virtues like dense, walkable cities; mixed uses; visually pleasing streetscapes; and diversification of industries within regions. 

I am, by nature, more of a quant than an aesthete.  I tend to approach queries like the role of government or the evolution of a city from an analytical perspective.  But even I understand that such things are as much art as science.  The Death and Life of Great American Cities may not be very numeric, but it is no less accurate, and no less relevant to cities like Philadelphia.  We who love urban settings have lost a great voice in our field.  But her ideas carry on. 

By the way, besides Jacobs' book, here are five others I'd recommend to whoever gets to decide on the next "One Book, One Philadelphia" selection:

Third and Indiana, Steve Lopez

Founding Brothers, Joseph Ellis

Iron Cages, Ronald Takaki

Code of the Street, Elijah Anderson

Crabgrass Frontier, Kenneth Jackson

I Wonder

I can tend to be a pretty driven person. I'm up at 5, scurrying
through a bevy of personal errands before Jada wakes up around 7 or 8
in the morning, and returning to scurry mode in the couple hours of
awake time I have after Jada goes down around 7 or 8 at night. Even
in between, when I'm watching Jada, sometimes I can be driven: I've
been known to feed her a meal while I'm myself eating, plus cooking
for the next meal, plus listening to the radio, plus doing a crossword
puzzle.

So it may come as a surprise (it's been a surprise to me, too) that
sometimes, every once in a while, when I'm watching Jada I actually do
slow down. One of the great things about having a kid is that every
so often, you get to see the world from a kid's perspective. That is
to say, you reclaim the emotion of wonder. Wonder is what I think
Jesus is looking for when He challenges His followers to come to Him
as children.

Wonder is lost in the lives of most adults. Some of this is good:
when we say goodbye to a dear friend, we don't wonder if we'll ever
see them again, because we know from experience that we will, while a
child might very well wonder, because he lacks that experience. But
some of this is most certainly bad: we have coated our hearts with
cynicism and callousness, insulating ourselves from feeling so as to
insulate ourselves from pain.

Ah, but what wonderful things we miss out as adults by numbing
ourselves in this way. And so I have been pleasantly surprised to
find myself reclaiming this sense of wonder when I spend time with
Jada. She'll pick up a twig and study it intently; you can almost
hear the synapses in her brain firing, as she tries to compare it to
previous information she's collected. She'll approach a dog to pet it
and it will suddenly lick her face, and she is immediately flooded
with uneasy fear mixed with absolute delight. She'll watch a bird
hop, hop, hop toward her, pick up a crumb of food on the ground, and
then dart up into the sky and up, up, and away to a faraway branch,
and you can tell she is wondering.

And I wonder along with her. In those times, my inherent drivenness,
my mindless enslavement to the clock and to my schedule and to an
internal ticking, all of that just fades away. Life slows down as I
watch my little one take it all in. And I am taking it all in with
her. In wonderment.

The Problem I Have with Activists Sometimes

It was in the editorial section of today's paper, but it could've been
in any paper on any day: an impassioned call to shut down factory
farms, boycott their products, and go organic instead. The writer,
who runs a local animal-rights group, talked off family farms being
bought out by multinational food companies, which convert land and
chickens into a massive assembly line to harvest eggs for our
breakfast tables. He spoke of hens and eggs left in feces, cages so
small their occupants couldn't even turn around, and other atrocities
that are hard to stomach over breakfast.

And so I was disappointed when I finished the article, and even reread
it, and found in it calls to only two actions: shut down the factory
farms, and go organic. The first seems like an awfully blunt
solution, like using a machete instead of a scalpel. And the second
doesn't really solve the problem, since most of the country isn't
going organic, no matter how many persuasive animal rights editorials
are written.

Here is a problem that is crying for a more reasoned, economics-based
government solution. For here is a market failure: each producer, no
matter how big or small, lacks sufficient incentive to care for the
animals that are harvesting the goods it is selling to the
marketplace. This is no different than car manufacturers lacking
sufficient incentive to voluntarily make more fuel-efficient cars, or
meat-packing plants lacking sufficient incentive to spend a few extra
bucks to make sure their production processes are safe to workers and
to consumers.

Notice I said "sufficient incentive." It's not like there's no
incentive. If activists write enough graphic letters, factory farms
will lose some business from offended consumers. There now exists a
market for fuel-efficient cars, while those that guzzle are becoming
less popular. And a scandal at the meat-oacking plant, whether a
work-related fatality or a contaminated batch of beef patties,
certainly hurts that firm enough that it would want to avoid such a
scandal in the first place.

But the incentive is insufficient to get each player to move more
fully in the direction of actions that would be in the overall greater
good. And that's where government regulations can help get us to that
better equilibrium. Remember those supply and demand curves you drew
in econ class? Think of the supply curve as being artificially low,
because the market price doesn't adequately reflect the real price of
a producing a good. Resetting the curve by enforcing government
regulations which will force producers to bear additional costs pushes
the supply curve up, and a new equilibrium is reached. Prices will be
higher, and amount consumed lower: a more appropriate level of price
and quantity, given the non-financial social costs we're trying to
minimize.

This is why I am sometimes upset with activists. I fault them not for
thinking too big, but for not thinking big enough. Protests,
boycotts, and support of alternative products are a drop in the bucket
compared to getting the supply and demand curves right. I wonder if
some protestors don't just want to put up a good fight for the cameras
or for their own consciences, but don't want to take the time to
understand how to truly right a wrong. Or maybe they don't want to be
perceived as "selling out" by trying to work within the mainstream for
broader change and not just change on the fringe.

Or what of the far-sighted producers who voluntarily do the right
thing? Is it because they've gotten religion? Or is it because it
makes for good press, and distinguishes their products in the market,
allowing them to look good and to capture the segment of the consumer
base that is into this kind of stuff? I applaud people like Gary
Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farms, a vocal champion of the organic
movement, who is willing to sacrifice the cache of his own product so
that the benefits of going organic can become more mainstream.

So what’s it going to be? If you want to give people the right to choose, you have to let some people go organic and some not. If you think people shouldn’t have the right to choose, you can be radical and try to blow the whole thing up – and what does that accomplish? Or you can figure out the right level of government regulation so that firms and individuals will make decisions that minimize the negative consequences of their actions. To introduce another analogy, in regards to gas-guzzling SUV’s, we can get owners to voluntarily buy Terrapasses (status quo) or blow up all the SUV’s (activist’s dream); or we can lobby for government regulation that requires SUV producers and consumers to pay their fair share of the pollution their vehicles impose on society.

Clarion calls to take down factory farms or go organic may sound good
on the editorial page, but I'm skeptical that they're the best way to
safeguard the rights of animals or meat packers, or ensure that we are
good stewards of our environmental resources so that future
generations can enjoy them as well. I applaud the zeal of activists.
I'll even give them the benefit of the doubt in terms of their
motives, even though I'm sure some are more interested in being
countercultural than in actually changing the culture. I just wish
they'd advocate solutions that can really make a difference.

Brick by Brick

The Inquirer had a nice piece in this weekend's Real Estate section on recycling parts of old buildings for reuse on new buildings.  Known as "harvesting," the process not only makes for a great story for those who will own and/or use the new structure, but makes good economic sense, too – if the government can make it work for builders and developers.  After all, every brick that gets salvaged from an unused house and fit into a brand-new house is one less brick that needs to be made AND one less brick that needs to be landfilled.

Of course, blowing the thing up is much faster and therefore a much more attractive solution for a developer on a timetable.  So this only works if the salvaged material is worth the time to salvage.  Sometimes it is on purely financial terms – the resale value more than pays for the added cost of deconstruction versus demolition. 

But sometimes it only works when you factor in the environmental impact.  But the developer, no matter how good-hearted he or she is, isn't getting paid to save the world, just to get the next project done.  Enter the government.  In the case of the building being harvested in the Inquirer article, the numbers made sense once federal funds through an EPA project were factored in. 

I like government intervention in these cases: financially, the math doesn't work, even if the social gains make it worth it, so you juice the equation and let the actors do their thing.  (A long parenthetical note: this is why I'm in favor of a national gas tax.  Individual actors, be they car manufacturers or everyday drivers, lack the incentive to consume the appropriate amount of gas, given the negative "externalities" generated by driving, like pollution or congestion.  Ratchet up the price via a tax at the pump, and, like anyone who took frosh year Economics knows, supply curve slides up and equilibrium quantity consumed slides down.)  It may not seem like a lot, but brick by brick, maybe we can save the earth. 

What Government Has to Do With Food

My friend and pastor's recent post on a book about where our food
comes from made me think about my view of government's role in
society. It was government, after all, that created food-related
safety laws in the early 20th century in response to the grotesque
descriptions of meat-packing plants in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle,
and government that required McDonald's and other fast-food
restaurants to make nutritional data on their offerings available to
customers.

I'm sure there were far-sighted private companies that worked hard to
create safe meat-packing workplaces and publish dietary information
before these government interventions, but there was an insufficient
incentive for everyone to do. In other words, absent outside
intervention, there was a market failure: free enterprise would do
things that would benefit themselves a little (not have to put in the
extra expense of cleaning up their packing plants or disclosing
health-related numbers) but at a great cost to overall society (unsafe
food, rampant obesity). Government intervention, then, either by its
scale and/or power, can and does enact regulations that enforce those
small costs so that society can reap great gains.

What does this have to do with The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael
Pollan, the book my friend just read? Much of the food production
industry is now dominated by a few cutthroat multinationals that are
obligated by their ownership by shareholders to process and provide
food at maximum profit. Each could take small measures that would
slightly reduce those profits but safeguard other, potentially large
social gains, like humane treatment of animals, processing of food
that has minimal negative impact on the environment, and support of
small farms in developing countries that need an economic boost. But,
like the Prisoner's Dilemma, each player isn't interested in the
greater good, just their own, even if it means less for them in the
long run.

Now, I'll be the first to tell you there's nothing inherently wrong
about being big, about making a profit, or about squeezing the supply
chain to make an extra buck. I'd also be the last to tell you
government is good at manipulating the markets for societal gain. So
what I'm about to say is much, much easier said than done. But
somewhere in between government getting out of the way of business and
government taking over business is a place for government to exercise
the role it best plays: using its size and/or authority to compensate
for market failures like the ones described above. Let's support our
people in government and hold them accountable to performing that role
with economic precision, political savvy, and common decency.

Trans-Racial Adoptions

The subject of trans-racial adoptions has been a hot one in the local news lately, what with a local family accusing Chester County of denying their request to adopt a boy for whom they had been foster care parents for two years, because they are white and he is black (the boy was taken from their home and placed for adoption with a black family).  While the National Association of Black Social Workers' stance on trans-racial adoptions has softened since the 1970's, when they referred to such cases as "cultural genocide," still for many it is a touchy subject.  An article on the front page of the local section in today's Philadelphia Inquirer explored the topic, and made me think anew of my own parenting responsibilities. 

I disagree with those who pooh-pooh the issue of race and think that the only thing that is important about placing a child for adoption is to find a family that wants to love him.  But I also disagree with those who think adoptive parents are incapable to correctly raising a child of a different race in a way that will enable that child to respect and own his racial identity. 

One of the great opportunities and challenges of race in the US is that we are a country in which what it means to be American is so vast and fluid.  Too often, when we say, "American," we mean white.  But Americans are also black, brown, yellow, red, and hybrids thereof.  We can take pride in George Washington AND Sojourner Truth AND Maya Lin AND Cesar Chavez.  We can glory in hot dogs and soul food and stir fry and burritos.  We all ought to celebrate, in some small way, the fullness of all things American.  And for those of us who have adopted into our families a child of a different family origin, much more so ought we cherish that flavor and take it for our own. 

In this country, it is, again, a great opportunity AND challenge, to raise a child of a different race as you are, to be American – to be a unique mixture of the cherished values of the parents, the racial origins of the children, and the cultural diversity of the moment.  Let's give parents the chance to love and care for children in this way.  And let's remind those parents that when they are adopting a child, they're not just assimilating him into their worldview but expanding their own worldview to include his. 

 

 

Sausage and Laws

Well, you knew financial whiz and political outsider John Corzine was
going to get heat for a sensible budget plan. What's telling is how
irked New Jersey state legislators are that he didn't pork it up with
them. One said, "There's been a real lack of communication," while
another lamented, "The governor doesn't seem to understand
legislators' parochial issues."

A lot of people, me included, have high hopes for him because since
he's so rich, he didn't have to pander to anyone to raise money to get
elected. But now that he's elected, he's going to have to do some
strategic pandering if he's going to have any hope to get stuff done.
After all, even if it makes sense to you and me that the state'll have
two rough years ahead before finances get turned around, that doesn't
play well with politicians who need to get re-elected in one year.
And who wants to be the legislator that signed off on the budget bill
that took jobs and services from the constituencies that will be
voting for him or her in 2007?

So expect some deal-making, some posturing, and some ugly compromises.
Now what's that famous saying about how with sausage and laws, you
don't want to see how either is actually made?

OPTING OUT

My first year out of college, I lived with six other people. All of us were involved in a Christian ministry on the PENN campus, so our living together was an opportunity to practice and experience intentional mini-community. For one, the oldest two in our group let the rest of use their car whenever we needed it. For another, we took turns buying groceries and split the food bill seven ways. It was a great year of seeing how living communally can have rich spiritual and practical benefits.

The next year, two of the seven of us had moved, one new person joined the ministry team and the house, and I left the ministry team but stayed in the house. Communal living was diffused, and not just in the spiritual aspects (for example, I wasn’t plugged into everyone else’s schedules, responsibilities, and meetings). Our eldest two were still generous with their car to me. But it was harder to justify splitting the food bill evenly. Everyone else ate most of their meals outside of the house and on campus, while I did a lot of cooking at home. So it made sense for me to bear a higher proportion of the monthly food bill, something which I willing did sometimes and sometimes was less receptive to.

By two years after that, I had left the house and so had almost everyone else I had lived with. But the new tenants were friends of ours and involved in varied ways with the original ministry, so the intent was there to practice Christian community. But that food bill got even harder to split fairly. One person wondered why he had to chip in for the chicken when he was a vegetarian, while another cried foul that she had bought all the cereal during her last shopping run and didn’t get a chance to enjoy any of it. Pretty soon, people started buying their own stuff and labeling it.

I share this story not to memorialize my original team of seven or to vilify the last group’s lack of willingness to share, but rather to illustrate how hard it is to share when the sense of community has become fragmented and diffuse. This kind of thing is happening more and more in our housing in this country. Homeowner’s associations like cooperatives and condominiums have been around for at least three decades, but this latest iteration, gated communities, has really been hot lately, especially in the high-growth areas in the West and Southwest. They offer tons of amenities for people who can afford them and who prefer them.

What they also do, though, is illustrate this diffusing of community. By opting into a gated community, a group of people have chosen out of other housing options which obligate them to be part of a broader tax and services package. It is precisely because they do not wish to be part of that broader tax and services package that they are opting into gated communities. For gated communities offer some level (not totally) of autonomy, to replace city services like trash collection with their own private trash collection, and to be “taxed” for just the services they want, no more and no less.

The economists will tell you this is a very efficient good, in that there aren’t any messy spillovers like there are in larger cities, where all families’ taxes go towards things like schools and parks and health clinics, even though not all families consume those things. The sociologists will vilify gated communities because they are destroying the notion of community in this country by literally walling off from the rest of the world.

I am doing neither in this post. I am just reminiscing over how great community was that one year I lived with six other people, and how quickly and easily those kinds of community benefits, and therefore the motivation to act communally, can erode over time.

The Opposite Kind of Testimony

You may have heard someone describe her conversion to Christianity as
a process of "cleaning up." That is, she was going on the wrong
direction, into the wrong things, when she met Jesus, and having
decided to follow Him, "cleaned up" her life. And in fact, thanks be
to God that in the Bible and in history and in our present day, people
are coming to faith in this way; the power of the good news of the
life, death, and resurrection is still in business, freeing people
from abuse and addiction and anger.

I, however, have a bit of the opposite kind of testimony. In the
world's eyes, my life before I became a Christian was quite clean.
I'm not saying, of course, that I was sinless – far from it. When I
hear of God's forgiveness of my sins through Jesus' work on the cross,
it is not a theoretical salvation for me but a real one, from real
sins and real hurts. But my pre-Christ life was pretty clean.
Growing up in the suburbs, in a decent family and with decent friends,
life was clean.

It's my post-Christ life that has been messy. For just by dint of
living and working and worshipping in a big city like Philadelphia, I
have taken into my heart pains and burdens that were once foreign to
me in my former, sheltered life. I have known people who have
murdered and who have been murdered. I have prayed for and cried with
people dying of AIDS. I have come before God on behalf of friends
whose lives have been marred by substance abuse and sexual molestation
and childhood abandonment.

I am neither proud nor ashamed of my own faith journey. I do not look
down on or exalt those whose faith journeys have been different. For
whether your life has become cleaner or messier as a result of
following Jesus, even if your journey looks very different from mine,
we are going in the same direction to the same destination under the
watchful eye of the same God.

A Surprising Source That’s Keeping the Housing Bubble from Bursting

My man Andrew Cassel came through again, and this time on a topic
we've studied to the gills in one of my classes, no less. He weighs
in on the housing bubble in yesterday's Inquirer, and conjectures that
there's still plenty of wind in these sails. But his reasons are
unusual, and they are related to the fussiness most people have about
the building of new houses.

It seems people don't like new houses anywhere. If it's on the
suburban fringe, their progressive sensibilities are offended and they
cry, "Sprawl!" If it's in an urban infill area, they calculate that
increased housing supply plus waning housing demand means a drop in
prices, and perhaps a precipitous enough one that all the equity
they've built up in their homes will come leaking out. If it's a
matter of crowding more houses on the same footprint, like with
townhouses or other multi-family vehicles, well they just don't like
having less elbow room in their community or vying with more cars on
their streets.

And let's not get started with the visceral reactions people have
towards mega-builders like Philadelphia-area's Toll Brothers. These
builders of bland McMansions are vilified by some as what's gone wrong
with American life. So an application for new housing, especially by
Toll Brothers, is bound to get the neighbors in full force at the
local zoning hearing.

How ironic then, according to Cassel, that such fuss actually
contributes to Toll Brothers' bottom line and its dominance in the
home-building industry. For increased zoning fussiness across the
country has made securing a spot of land upon which to build houses a
long, legally drawn out, and therefore expensive endeavor. This has
contributed to a concentration of power among the biggest builders, of
which Toll Brothers is one, for they alone have the economies of scale
to pay for lawyers and such.

In fact, Cassel quotes in his column that the top ten builders
together control a fifth of the market, double what they controlled
just eight years ago. With that concentration comes an easier
landscape for Toll Brothers and others to simply pass on the added
cost of securing land to their customers in the form of higher house
prices. So fussy zoning hearing attendees, take heart, for your
battles against Toll Brothers are not in vain: even if you lose, your
reward is that the high-priced houses they build will ensure that your
house remains high-priced.

Saratoga

I grew up in the skinny part of San Jose between Cupertino and
Saratoga. The part of Cupertino we bordered was, back then, a
relatively low-income neighborhood. (Now, of course, McMansions are
being built and bought in the $800,000 range.) Saratoga, however, was
always a high-income neighborhood.

But I could never understand why anyone would want to live there. I
knew I wouldn't. There were no sidewalks to run on. The windy roads
prevented you from getting a good head of steam going on your bike.
And I always got lost because there only seemed to be two or three
roads going in and out of the neighborhood, unlike the grid-like
system in my part of San Jose, where if you didn't know a particular
road, you could still find your way to where you were going by heading
in the general direction.

Turns out Saratoga knew what it was doing. We love our gated
communities in this country because they offer us a sense of
separateness. Why let random, possibly criminal people loitering
through our streets when they can be stopped at the security
checkpoint? Well, short of fencing off the neighborhood, Saratoga did
everything else it could to offer its residents that same sense of
separateness. No sidewalks means no incentive for non-residents to
pass through on foot, bike, or skateboard. Windy roads make it harder
for anybody to get in and around without a car. And having access in
and out of the neighborhood choked off to two or three roads, instead
of being easily navigable through myriad gridded streets, kept the
pass-through traffic to a minimum, perhaps even deterring a crook from
popping in, doing something crooked, and then having multiple easy
ways out.

Well, you get what you pay for. Saratogans pay a high price for
access to such a neighborhood, for one. And the comfort of
separateness also has a cost of isolation. I guess, many years later,
I still wouldn't want to live in Saratoga.

Addicted to Oil

In his State of the Union address this year, President Bush spoke of
America being "addicted to oil." Lately, I've been thinking he ain't
wrong: the economists would tell you the price of gas in this country
would have to go to something like $10 per gallon before people would
start making major changes in the way they get around. In other
words, the economists would say the cost of driving is inelastic:
price increases won't lead to commensurate consumption decreases.
Maybe the goal of a national gas tax, which some (including me) are
for, wouldn't do much to curb our appetite for driving.

It reminds me of another thing we tax in this country: cigarettes.
Governments like to tax cigarettes for two reasons. One, it makes it
look like they're doing something to decrease the amount of smoking,
by raising the cost of smoking. Of course, it usually doesn't work
this way: smokers, like drivers, are pretty price inelastic. But that
leads to the second reason governments like to tax cigarettes.
Because smokers are price inelastic, you can slap a tax on cigarettes
and pretty much guarantee yourself a nice amount of tax revenues.

In theory, that tax revenue can then be used to fund good things to
offset all the bad things smokers impose on the rest of us, good
things like public health programs and anti-smoking campaigns. In the
same way, maybe we should see a gas tax (or other attempts to reduce
driving, like congestion pricing or a higher motor vehicle tax) not as
a way of decreasing the amount of driving but of paying for the cost
all this driving is imposing on all of us. In other words, let's
concede that Americans love their cars, and simply make sure that they
pay a little more than they do now, so that all the costs they impose
on society that they currently underpay for (like pollution and
congestion and automobile accidents) can be more fairly paid for. I
mean, if we're letting smokers smoke, maybe we ought to let drivers
drive.

Walmart Can't Win

Walmart is often vilified for, among other things, epitomizing sprawl.
Whether it is their consumption of former farmland, their
aesthetically ugly big boxes, or their stealing of business from local
moms and pops to regional stores with massive parking lots, Walmart,
in the eyes of some, represents everything wrong about how America is
sprawling.

Yesterday, I heard on the radio that Walmart said a lot of its growth
in new stores in this country will come from urban infill development:
sites within city limits that are unused or underused, like
environmental brownfields or decaying shopping centers. This is the
antithesis of all the things above: they're growing inside cities
instead of on their fringes, and they'll have to design these stores
to fit on footprints smaller than they're used to when land isn't a
constraint.

And yet I'm betting they're going to get a lot of flack for this
strategy. Some of it will be NIMBY, with citizens not wanting "that
evil store" in their neighborhood. Others will decry the store for
putting small businesses out of business.

I'm not here to argue that Walmart is great for creating jobs and
offering low prices; that's Walmart's job. I'm just pointing out that
Walmart can't seem to win. Maybe it's because people don't realize
there's two alternatives to everything and they're mad either way.

Condo Boom

I grew up assuming that condos were for rich people and that rich
people were bad. So it's a bit ironic that I'm now loving the condo
boom here in Philadelphia. Let me explain.

The condo boom is fueled partly by demographics -- those active
boomers are now empty nesters and they're flocking back to cities for
the vibrancy and the culture. Part of it is rising incomes, which
enable both those aforementioned boomers as well as young
professionals to afford condos. Part of it is the flight to the
suburbs of professional and manufacturing jobs, leaving behind old
factories and offices that can converted into condos.

And part of it is city policy -- a ten-year abatement on property
taxes for any new construction makes buying a condo all the more
affordable, since you don't have to worry about the property tax bite
every year. So the city isn't gaining anything -- yet -- from all
these new condo owners within city limits, in terms of more property
tax revenues. But those new condo owners are buying things and
consuming leisure in city limits, and that does help.

It also stems, although not by much, some of the excessive
decentralization that is happening in Philadelphia as well as other
cities. Some heads are moving from the suburbs into the city, and
others are moving into denser locations within the city. This
popularization of high-density living is a nice check against sprawl,
although again not a huge amount compared to the massive flight to the
suburbs by most people.

Who knew that I'd feel so good about a condo boom?

Bad Reasons to be Against the War

Living in Philadelphia and running in the circles I run in, I'm often
in the minority when it comes to political issues. The war in Iraq is
a big one. While I wouldn't consider myself a hawk, I supported the
war from the beginning and continue to do so.

I don't begrudge the views of those who are on the other side of this
debate. In many regards, I wish I was on that side, too; war is a
terrible thing, and only the sickest people welcome it gladly. I also
understand, respect, and in some cases agree with the positions that
people against the war have. I also have a lot of problems with some
of the things that are said by those who are not against the war.

What concerns me, though, is bad reasons to be against the war. In my
opinion, here are some bad reasons to be against the war:

• "War is always wrong." People who believe this say things like, "I
prefer peace," "why can't we just all get along," and "using force
isn't the Christian thing to do." But peace sometimes isn't an
immediately available option, geopolitics are more complicated than
just world leaders solving their problems over warm milk and cookies,
and there are plenty of godly uses of force in the Bible. This
doesn't mean war is automatically right, but it also doesn't mean it's
automatically wrong.

• "We shouldn't mess in other peoples' business." People who believe
this are uneasy with America throwing its power around in other
places, or think the billions we've spent in the Middle East are
irresponsible given the problems we face on our doorstep. I for one
believe that with economic might and political power comes a moral
responsibility to be involved, and that closing ranks and focusing
solely on our own problems is awfully small-minded in a world that is
so politically and economically interconnected. Again, this doesn't
mean waging an expensive war outside our borders is automatically
right, but it also doesn't mean it's automatically wrong.

• "Bush lied, we now know it, so we should pull out now." Now we're
getting somewhere. Was W disingenuous in convincing the American
people to go to war? Perhaps. Impeachment-worthy? I'll listen. But
pull out immediately? That makes no sense. People who have been
against this war from the beginning have increased their vehemence
that the right thing to do is to get out of Iraq ASAP. But that's a
false choice. Back then, we had to decide whether or not to go to
war. Now that we're in it, the choice isn't between staying in it or
traveling back three years in time and never going to war in the first
place. Have people who advocate a full and immediate withdrawal of
troops thought through the consequences of what that would happen
next? Any time you're faced with a fork in the road and you choose
one path and decide later that you should've chosen the other path,
you can't at that point choose that other path, because you're not at
that fork anymore. Now I'm not saying that you should throw good
money after bad, but nor do I think it's fair to say that the better
alternative to continuing to fight is to pull out and imagine that the
last three years didn't happen.

Again, I respect the anti-war position and the people who advocate it.
I just don't like any permutation of the following three reasons,
because I think they're short-sighted and wrong.

It’s Great to Be a Dog

A speaker I heard once made a distinction between "dog" Christians and
"cat" Christians. Dogs look at their owners and say, "You feed me,
you care for me, you love me . . . you must be God!" Cats, of course,
look at their owners and say, "You feed me, you care for me, you love
me . . . I must be God!"

It's a funny distinction but an important one when it comes to the
Christian faith. For I fear that too many people who pass for
Christians these days are really "cats" and not "dogs." And I believe
the Bible is quite clear – dangerously clear – that God seeks "dog"
Christians and in the end will have nothing to do with "cat"
Christians.

But who are all these "cat" Christians? Well, first you have people
who consider themselves Christian by association: "I'm Christian
because my family is, or because my nation is, or because I went to
church when I was a kid." Somewhat related are those who think being
Christian is solely about our actions and habits: "I'm Christian
because I go to church and try to be a good person." You can be a
theology Christian: "My faith is about knowing the Bible inside and
out." Or an issues Christian: "My faith is about seeking justice, or
serving the poor, or saving the environment." You can be a
church-first Christian: "The most important thing in life is to serve
the church." Or even a missions-minded Christian: "The most important
thing in life is to see the gospel of Jesus Christ spread to more
people and more places."

But you can easily do all of these from a "cat"-centric perspective
and not a "dog"-centric one. That is, you can do and think and say
all the right things, but still have your faith have you in the center
instead of God. Let me put it this way: where do you start when you
start to pray? Is it with personal requests? "Lord, help me with my
studies." Is it with intercessions for others? "Lord, heal my
uncle." Is it with help for ministry? "Lord, bless the Bible study
I'm leading tonight." All good requests, all things God wants us to
pray, and yet easily prayed from a human-centric and not God-centric
perspective.

Or take reading the Bible. Is it to pick out individual verses that
speak to a struggle you're struggling with, or to understand the full
story of what God's like and what He's about? It's great that we turn
to the Scriptures for comfort when we need comfort and for peace when
we are anxious, but it's incorrect to relegate the Bible to the same
status as the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series.

For prayer and Scripture study, and the Christian life in general,
isn't about us tapping into the Almighty to help us live our lives
better for us, but about us tapping into the Almighty to help us live
our lives better for Him. This is what it means to follow Jesus and
to accept His way of salvation: not that we check a box and now have
access to a magical genie, but that we die to being boss of our lives
and live for a new boss. This is an extremely unpopular invitation in
any culture, not just a modern or Western one, because the biggest
obstacle to God being God in our lives is us wanting to stay being God
in our lives. We all want to be cats, not dogs.

I am impaired in telling you how great it is to be a "dog" Christian,
for two reasons. One is that I seldom act like a "dog" Christian, and
all too often don't act like any kind of Christian. Two is that if I
emphasized how great it was, it would be tempting to view that
greatness with "cat" eyes. Take the whole "Prayer of Jabez" fad that
hit a few years ago. Bruce Wilkinson is a deeply profound and wise
person, and I think he speaks truth in his bestselling book. But a
lot of "cat" Christians read that book with "cat" eyes and kept on
being "cats." Read it again, with "dog" eyes, and you'll see how much
more you'll get out of it.

Nevertheless, let me say that it's great to be a "dog," and I strive
to be a better one each day. While our natural selves fight to stay
God in our lives, deep inside there is another aspect of us that longs
to live for something and Someone greater.

The next time you go to a Starbucks, you might find the following
quote from Rick Warren on your cup: "You are not an accident. Your
parents may not have planned you, but God did. He wanted you alive
and created you for a purpose. Focusing on yourself will never reveal
your real purpose. You were made by God and for God, and until you
understand that, life will never make sense. Only in God do we
discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our
significance and our destiny."

What if we all got this? If we exchanged our agendas for God's? Not
only would we make great impacts in this world and have terrifically
fulfilling lives, but God would be glorified to the nth. And that's,
ultimately, all this dog wants.

Recess Isn’t a Break From Learning

Malcolm Gladwell's book review of Stephen Johnson's "Everything Bad is
Good For You" confirms something I've been telling nervous Asian
parents for over a decade: the best education has very little to do
with what goes on in the classroom. Johnson argues that video games,
far from dumbing kids down, require a vast amount of memory,
processing, and decision-making. "Playing a video game is, in fact,
an exercise in constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving
through the tasks in the correct sequence. It's about finding order
and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that
order."

Gladwell cautions that we shouldn't swing to the other end of the
pendulum and throw out explicit learning like memorizing trig
functions and historical events. But he finds it telling that some
schools are shortening recess, thinking it a frivolous break from real
learning, when in fact recess is when some profoundly deep learning is
taking place: "unstructured environment that requires the child
actively to intervene, to look for the hidden logic, to find order and
meaning in chaos."

Asian parents can tend to stress explicit learning instead. Yet even
though the fields they want their children to end up in, like medicine
and engineering, require a lot of explicit learning, even greater
success will come to those who are also well-versed in more fluid
forms of thinking: fast situation recognition, simplifying complex
situations, creatively solving problems.

This notion takes on special meaning for me as a new parent. Where
our children go to college, high school, even elementary school: these
are important choices that will affect their competitiveness, their
quality of life, their maturity. And so in reading Gladwell's book
review, I am reminded that what I am looking for isn't just stellar
academics but also an environment that can foster the kinds of
cognition that make for effective people. Recess, after all, isn't a
break from learning; it's when the learning really takes place.

What Makes America America

Early in Ken Burns' documentary on baseball, author Gerald Early says,
"The three things the historians will remember America for a thousand
years from now are the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball." I
would be inclined to agree with him, and if you think about, all three
get at what America is. The Constitution has survived over two
centuries, at once rigid and fluid. Jazz is beautiful because it is
wild and improvisational and yet rhythmic and basic. Baseball is a
kid's game, and yet fans appreciate that there are infinite nuances
and permutations to enjoy.

America, after all, was instituted as a place where the pursuit of
happiness, not the happiness itself, was perceived to be a God-given
right. In other words, we are a country in journey, never arriving,
ever debating and innovating. At our best, you see this in our
government and our economy and our art forms. At our best, immigrants
stream onto our shores and add to the flavor, businesses are birthed
daily, and political discourse yields not a once-and-for-all solution
but an ongoing dialogue with new players and new angles adding every
cycle.

At our worst, we stifle these things, discourage them, forget that
they are what is at our core as a nation. We become xenophobic and
arrogant and cautious and close-minded. But while I worry when I see
our country at its worst, I still hope for the best.