Down by the tracks

I’m on a retreat right now.  I’m taking the train from Los Angeles to Washington, DC, with a change in Chicago.  It’ll take four days.  The boy is with his grandparents, and the dog is with a trainer who hopefully will get her to stop jumping on people.  I have a two-person “roomette” to myself for the entirety of the journey.  After fifteen months of full time single parenting with just two six day breaks when the ex-wife flew out to have in-person time, I’m savouring every moment of being solitary, just the gentle sway of the train, and no more human contact than the occasional trips to the cafe car for mixers and ice. I miss the boy and the dog, but my guess is, on some level, they’re both enjoying a break from me, too.

I love long distance trains in the US, but to date, I’ve only done one trip on my own – all the others were with the boy.  It’s a completely different experience; instead of keeping the boy occupied with board games, arts and crafts, and conversation, I am spending my time reading and writing and, mostly, just watching the scenery.

Coming out of Los Angeles Union Station, the train travelled along the comical hellscape of the industrial zones along the Los Angeles River.  The riverbed was replaced midcentury with a massive concrete channel for flood control purposes, which with global warming has become less and less of an issue.  Despite this still being the spring runoff season, the river as we passed by was barely a trickle.  If you’ve ever seen a movie set in LA featuring a car chase scene, it almost certainly featured the channel – it’s much easier to get filming rights in a flood control feature than on an actual highway.  The river today is bordered by the train, and by industrial decline.

Because the train route has been used for so long, the buildings along side it are now mostly abandoned and in many cases falling down.  Manufacturing doesn’t happen in city cores any more, and thus the warehouses and factories located close to Union Station are now primarily used for graffiti art, U-Store It self-warehousing facilities, scrap yards, and homeless encampments.  This is true of every city that I’ve traveled to by train in the United States – Los Angeles is by no means the worst – but because the backdrop is the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains, it just feels more absurd.  In Philadelphia – landscape flat – the burned out industrial detritus is all you see, and you kind of shrug it off.  In LA, you wonder why no one cleans up the damn place and uses the land for something that at least takes advantage of the view.

As the train escaped Los Angeles proper and continued on toward San Bernadino, the mountains got closer, and the air started to lose a little of the smoggy greenery.  It was also getting on towards 8pm – the train was late out of the station – and the sun started hitting the high clouds at a low angle, turning them pink and orange (I assume, being colour blind, that this was the case) and creating lovely dark contrasts as the valley started to close in.  San Bernadino is mentioned as the last town before LA in the song “Route 66”, and you might say that today it marks the eastern edge of the LA basin.  As an edge city, it is sprawled out and lazily planned; the developers correctly assumed that only people with an automobile would be living there, and so streets are wide to facilitate U-turns, the sidewalks are almost flat to the street so that kids on bikes wouldn’t need to curb hop and poor parallel parking jobs wouldn’t scrap chrome rims, and lots are large enough to have space for at least three cars for friends to drive over for backyard entertaining.  

Watching them roll by, it made me think of other things.  I’m on my town’s long range planning committee, and we think a lot about how subdivisions and residential development should work.  Our town is growing, along with most towns in southern Maine, a result of the long-term trend of hipsters moving to Portland and starting hipster entrepreneurial things, and the more immediate trend of people realizing “hey, working from home really means work from anywhere”, and since the long-term trend means that people can now find the same microbreweries attached to vegan French-Thai-Peruvian bistro pop-ups they expect in the big city, we’re now attracting both millennials fleeing Brooklyn and their silver-haired boomer parents, looking for a cute place on the coast, who will subsidize the millennials’’ lifestyles – as well as panicky Gen-Xers looking to raise their kids away from the metropolis while still working remotely for Goldman or BCG or whatever.  

Scarborough, with its beaches and marshes, already has a good base of upper middle class white people, and those folks tend to cluster.  We also, however, have a lot of middle tier businesses (and their not-upper middle class owners and definitely lower middle class employees) who wouldn’t be able to afford commercial space or housing if the town turned into an outpost of the Hamptons.  I’m really pleased that our long-range plan is going to direct the planning board to prioritize more “affordable housing” – that is to say, housing that normal people can buy – and therefore limit the permits available for the cul de sacs with five or six 3500 square foot “cottages” for the Biff’s and Cindi’s from the Upper West Side to decamp to on weekends or from where they can run their fintech startup. The town values being “welcoming”; the plan doesn’t mention “maximizing rentier value”.

Affordable housing is exactly what the developments in San Bernadino, visible from the train windows, were designed to be as they were built over the past fifty years or so.  The ones you can see from the tracks are very affordable, because they are by train tracks; you’re not going to pay up to have fifty freight trains, several dozen commuter trains, and two long-distance trains heading past your children in the back yard every day.  A lot of those lots don’t actually sell, and once the developer has made his profit, they end up vacant, and as anyone who lives in or around any large city knows, vacant lots attract dead couches, stolen cars stripped of anything of value, piles of discarded white goods, and indigenous weeds.

The view from my roomette from Riverside to the base of the mountains developed a kind of rhythm: a stretch of lower middle class cookie cutter development right by the track was followed by a fence that separated it from a used car lot or a strip mall; then another fence, then heavy industry or scrap followed by a train station with a commuter lot, then heavy industry again, then a fence, a strip mall, a fence, and then more lower middle class subdivisions.  Repeat for each of the five or six commuter stations we passed until finally, it petered out, and we left the urban basin behind and began to climb towards the pass in earnest.  On past long distance rides, I didn’t normally have a chance look at this stuff – the first couple hours after boarding a train were spent putting things away, taking play stuff out, the first few hands of Uno, maybe some Cafe Car snacks to celebrate the beginning of the journey – but that’s why you go on a retreat: to shift your mind a bit, to notice new things.

As sky went dark, I made a gin and tonic and read an issue of an environmental magazine about plastics.  It was an okay read, but plastics came after this particular urban disaster, and my mind kept wandering back to that rhythmic pattern in San Bernadino, and the turn of the century development pattern in LA.  They were similar but, interestingly, not necessarily connected to train proximity for the same reasons.  LA’s decaying factories and warehouses were placed there in a pre-automobile-dominant age; without decent sized trucks, companies would naturally locate as much production and logistics facilities as close to the train yard as possible.  And by extension, LA’s downtown was located there because those same businesses and logistics firms needed access to legal services (for contracts, registering title), to insurance brokers, to accounting, and banking firms. The station and the proximate train yards would thus cluster heavily and invite a certain level of density and white collar business development.  Even the residential areas would generally be close by and denser in an era of streetcars; the wide streets that fan out from downtown LA are wide because of what would now be called light rail, the rails long since torn up to maximize car access.

Cars and trucks had destroyed the need for proximity by roughly 1925, however, and LA’s downtown quickly spread out to take advantage of the views of the mountains and the sweet breezes off the ocean.  Ironically, of course, that sprawl then produced the heat sink that has largely eliminated the breezes more than a mile or so inland, and the smog that prevents one from seeing the mountains except when the wind is just right to blow the sky clean and fan the forest fires in the mountains.  But oh well; shit happens.  Anyway, LA’s downtown is denser than most people realise because of that original effect of the rail line finding its way to one particular spot in LA County in the late 1880s.

San Bernadino was a sleepy rest stop kind of town back in those days, although since in the age of steam, you needed more railroad service points, it was an important one: the last service point before the trains slogged their way up the Cajon Pass and into the long soft ascent into the high desert on its way towards the east.  Railroad service towns generally have downtowns a few blocks away, though, because the railroads needed to stockpile parts, fuel, lubricants and whatnot, and they needed space to shunt trains and turn them around and repair them.  All of this was sort of unsightly and generally loud and smelly.  In many towns the only “nice” building around the train tracks would have been the station house; all the other nice buildings (banks, mercantiles, hotels, old-timey confectionaries) would be far enough away to make business owners, customers, and parents happy.  

Once the steam trains were replaced with diesel electrics, though, the need for lots of service points along the long distance routes was massively reduced.  As the railroads rationalized, most of the long routes in the US moved to service points separated by hundreds of miles, basically the length of a 12 hour crew shift.  The redundant service towns often just dried up and disappeared, although the rise of the automobile helped some of them repurpose as service points for long distance car travel.  But the service yards close to the stations were torn up and the towns were left with cheap, empty real estate that faced the tracks – albeit still close to the tracks, and with the remaining industrial waste that large companies leave behinds when they abandon a site.  Businesses which needed cheap land, or were loud or smelly or had piles of equipment or scrap or the like, tended to migrate there; retail and service businesses, not so much.

Meanwhile, the nicer residential areas – or at least, the denser ones – were clustered away from the station and the tracks already, close to where the tonier businesses had created their separate downtowns.  The towns that didn’t dry up developed what today we’d call “quaint” old time character, with a film-worthy main street, Queen Anne style homes with filigree and turrets, perfect for bed and breakfasting, and probably a brick or stone library.  They’d also have restrictive covenants to keep out Blacks and Italians and Jews, of course, but we’ll deal with that in a minute.

As the car slowly expanded the limits of what was considered “suburban” for Los Angeles – both with highways crisscrossing the basin, and companies and factories now located broadly across the entire basin and no longer simply in the downtown area – places like San Bernadino became viable for more development.  This would have been in the 1960s or so – the explosion of limited access highway development took place well after the war.  Nicer places would locate first near what were already nice spots – close to a downtown – although as tastes expanded to larger lots and larger homes, nicer areas would move farther away, and eventually even the originally pleasantly located downtowns would begin to struggle, much as in LA itself.  And as those larger “nice” homes pushed outwards, eventually developers would see an opportunity to use the land closer to the rail line for affordable housing. 

On a certain level, for lower middle class people, it was an okay trade: not great location but you got a big house with a big yard and you could afford it.  On another level, though, that attachment to lot and house size leads to ghettoization.  Remember the old saw in real estate – only three things matter: location, location, and location.  It may have seemed like a good trade to buyers in the by-the-tracks developments in the outer suburbs but they lost out on capital appreciation – especially in places like San Bernadino County, where there was always another tract of desert to develop just a little further off down I-15.  

I’m not talking about the ghettoes which are created consciously here: this is not walling off parts of Warsaw, or redlining via an explicit agreement between lenders, builders, and realtors to keep (insert name of discriminated race or underclass here) away from (insert name of master race or overclass here).  Don’t get me wrong – early on, that was an actual thing.  Suburbs that expanded in the 50s and 60s retained restrictive covenants, up until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – but formal ghetto creation and maintenance continued well into the 1980s due to bank redlining which they “blamed” on credit standards, and arguably still exists today in plenty of informal ways.  But you don’t need any racism or even classism to give rise to ghettos.

No, this is much more subtle – this phenomenon (in the US at least) plays on people’s desire to participate in a materialist dream, of homeownership, and from there of owning a bigger home.  When the developments along the tracks were first built, the homes next to the railroad looked and felt much the same as the houses further away, built at the same time – but they cost less.  Yes, there’s noise, but maybe you visit the house during a lull in traffic, or maybe your little boy or girl sees the train and says “Train!” and they laugh and you laugh and the charm factor actually goes up.  They can’t cost too little as the developer still wants a profit, but he also wants a complete neighbourhood: they know that if there are too many empty lots, the entire tract, including the higher priced houses further away, will suffer.  But there is going to be a pricing curve, with lower prices designed to tempt people who otherwise might not be able to buy a market priced home closer to the downtown to buy close to the trains. 

But: after twenty or thirty years of noise and freight traffic and your daughter grows up and even she doesn’t think it’s cute. And the one or two empty lots that simply couldn’t be sold evolve into ad hoc dumpster sites; and, at least in the US, the curve between “nice” and “affordable” and “single family detatched slum” steepens to limit approaches infinity, and voila: you’ve created your trackside ghetto.  

Ghettoization, moreover, is the evil twin brother of gentrification; indeed they often walk hand in hand.  Inner city neighborhoods get bought up, renovated, redeveloped, and sprinkled liberally with the dust of aspirational brands and, initially, the hipsters get sucked in like moths to a low commercial rent flame (this is you, Portland).  The people who used to live there – old Polish families in Brooklyn, Seattle’s Black community in the Central District, Portland’s Irish underclass and immigrant families in Bayside – find rents ticking up, find their local shops that catered to lower middle income families selling out to boutique shops selling $15 tins of Spanish mackerel and soaps handcrafted by Andean indigenous peoples for $12 a bar, and need to find somewhere else.  The developers gin themselves up at this point and build affordable, but marginally located, new outer communities – location is sketchy, maybe too close to the tracks / interstate / requires an hour commute with no public transit – but the homes are larger, the environment suburban, the American dream made affordable.  Thus the exurban economic ghetto emerges out of the stalking shadow of gentrification.

The planning challenge my town gets to face is this: Scarborough does not want to create a series of affordable housing “zones”; we want to create a welcoming environment where any portion of the town will be welcoming (with the understanding that the rich people who can afford waterfront views have already made the beachside villages unbearably smug; that ship has sailed).  The planning committee – including our town councilors – want to build a place which doesn’t have zones, but instead has places almost everywhere (again, except for the smug-only zones by the beach) for almost everyone.  To achieve that, we’ll need to keep issuing building permits – that’s basic supply and demand; keeping a mix of affordable housing means we have to have supply overall at least keep pace with increasing demand to ensure we remain on the same pricing indifference curve.  However, to do that without creating the rise of “undesirable” areas which degenerate into class ghettos, we’ll probably have to impose density, particularly on the nicer neighborhoods, and we’ll probably need to carefully restrict development in areas at risk of sliding down a ghetto slope.  

That’s ironic, really.  It means we should think carefully intentionally steering density into areas which already have demand from upper middle class types who want their McMansion, and we will end up preserving as undeveloped areas those that are kind of marginal but just good enough to think “yeah, some people might be willing to live there if we make it cheap enough”, and make sure no one develops them.  That will be difficult, and the smarter class bigots in town have already started making noise about “preserving our rural, small town character” (code for: don’t you dare let multifamily housing impinge on my 1.3 acre farmhouse contemporary), while the smug zones by the beach are getting increasingly vocal about demanding that no one better fucking allow new development in their robber baron era enclaves.  My guess is that the planning board – which will own the permitting process once the zoning changes that come out of the long range plan are implemented – will have to be subtle in how they allocate the permits, and vigilant against euphemistically worded proposals for developments which are really simply trying to create areas that are cheap, not inexpensive, or on the other hand, are trying to redevelop areas that are inexpensive into areas which are no longer affordable.

And the train keeps rocking, my solitary carrel in Car 0430 quiet, as the sun starts descending behind us.

Oddly, I settled on the form and content of this essay long after the train had left Los Angeles and San Bernadino behind last night.  I started writing while we were crossing from Arizona into New Mexico, still paralleling I-40 and the remnants of Route 66, but now in the high desert.  There is no planning or even, really, development in any planned way in the high desert.  Don’t think houses: the residences are just structures, usually manufactured houses or simple trailers – and they are placed almost randomly around the desert, with a dirt driveway dragged out to join it to the main road, maybe clustered together where someone bought enough land to justify doing several of these at once.  The precariousness of the economy in that area, based as it is on cattle and mining, means many of these houses will be rented, not owner-occupied, and indeed, the train passed many abandoned homes and village sites along the way.  There are a few towns, the ones that could survive both the transition away from train servicing to Route 66 road traveler servicing, and then the next transition from low speed Route 66 to high speed Interstate 40 servicing which, like the trains before it, could be done at much farther remove, and there are also a lot of just functional camps, collections of housing for an economic extraction business which has been lost and forgotten. So much of what we passed, before reaching Albuquerque and then snaking into the mountains again, was dead – places where the former people just left, stopped paying rent, and whoever owns the plot has long since ceased to care about what happens to what was left behind. And between the towns, ghost and barely alive, there were endless vistas of high desert – mesas against the horizon, dust devils swirling into the void, and that void above blue, endless blue gigantic sky, so restorative after the pollution and yellow-green miasma of southern California.

It occurred to me that one of the reasons Los Angeles and San Bernadino developed the way they did was not just the automobile.  I think the people who build cities carry with them as muscle memory the forms of the place they just left, and of the places they crossed to get to their new home.  People who leave a densely populated city will tend to build downtowns and residential areas that have at least a modicum of density to them as well, even when they find themselves in a plain with no constraints to growth in any direction.  Early Los Angeles was built by people who moved from the Midwest of the late 1800s – those towns were small and clustered and centered around distinctive neighborhoods, which is echoed in the residential streets of Los Angeles that developed before 1930.  The people who moved to San Bernadino, though, came from the wide open spaces of the western prairies, pushed out by the Great Depression and later attracted by the opportunity of postwar boom times, moving from homestead farms of first 160 acres and then 640 acres as the land given away became more sparse.  Or they came from claustrophobic mining and mill towns, or escaping sharecropping, where they couldn’t own the land because the company they worked for didn’t want them to.  That latter generation cherished the ideal of owning a bit of land, of having that backyard and that double wide carport with a real house, not a trailer or a shack.

I think that also helps to explain the differences in architectural and city planning character of cities in the UK and Europe and North America.  The UK went through their population and town planning explosion in the early 19th century; newcomers to the growing cities were emerging from barely medieval farms across rural England and Scotland.  Quite literally, a roof over their heads, with a stove and more than one room, was aspirational – and inexpensive to deliver, which made builders happy whether they were landlords or selling on spec, even if by 1870 they were practically Dickensian in their squalor.  France and Germany, meanwhile, both have a longer tradition of tightly packed rural development, where families went out to the fields but returned in the evening to a central village structure; they didn’t live in farmhouses, they lived in the village and the farms were at a distance.  Their cities reflected this, and when the two countries industrialised and urbanised, the construction of the 19th and early 20th century reflected a population already comfortable walking up flights of stairs, buildings surrounding one another in block-sized courts, differentiation by floor as much as by location.

And as the train sways gently back and forth, and what is essentially a trip to nowhere, I’m also struck by what I think is a further mental imprint – how you got to your new urban destination.  In early 19th century England, you would have walked – and likely you would have done so in France and Germany later on, as unlike in the US, rail remained in Europe an aspirational form of travel for a long time.  That walk – to Manchester and Birmingham, to Paris or Marseilles, to Essen or to Hamburg – would have kept your mindset grounded to human scale, to the villages, much like the one you had left, that you passed along the way.

That happened to a certain extent in colonial North America, but practically that phase was over by 1850 or so.  Railroads exploded in the US in the 1830s, actually prior to mass urbanization, which only followed after the Civil War. Thus US created its urban middle and working classes by mechanized transport – indeed, the railroad might have pay your fare to move to your new home in Iowa in 1867 because when you got to your farm, you’d be producing crops that you’d then have to use the railroad to get to market; or if they shipped you from Ellis Island to Chicago when you came off the boat in 1875, the fare would be picked up by a steel mill or a stockyard that needed the quasi-beholden labour.  When a little later, say 1890 or 1910, your children decided to leave the farm or town to go to the new railhead city of Los Angeles, they would still be taking the train – a paying fare this time, but much like discount airlines today, the fare would have been tuned to maximize throughput – third class was the Southwest Airlines or Ryanair of its day.  And those travelers would have been taking that journey across a landscape that was almost unfathomably large, that seemed like it could never be exhausted, that it could fulfill any appetite of man for space.  Later, other hopefuls would take their beat-up Ford or Chevrolet to escape the south or the dust belt or the played out mines of Colorado, and the visceral experience of crossing the desert on their own, in their own motors, would imprint the idea of space on their desires even more deeply.    

I started out to the city for university, from a town on the ocean where I had walked to school on a two lane country road. My journey to get there was first by being driven by my parents, owing to certain moving violations which in the eye of the State of Maine disqualified me from taking the wheel myself – but from then on I took the train, and to find my vocation and my career, I rode jets. Crossing continents and oceans, when I landed, I stuck to my feet and to the urban rails. That phase of my life largely having been completed, I’m now a father in a car-oriented semi-rural town, a rapidly growing town, which itself is accepting newcomers who each have their own story of arrival.  The task we have as a town is to envision a community space for all of them, without crowding any of them into a space where, simply by virtue of what their desires were and the material limitations they faced when they first arrived, they might find themselves trapped, down by the 21st century equivalent of the undesireable land by the tracks.

For now, though, I’m crossing another mountain pass, through lodgepole pines, trying to find new thoughts and learn more about the world, to notice new things and put them in a new order.  I’m on retreat, after all, even if the carrel in which I read and write and meditate is moving clickety-clack across the rails. Being on the railroad, moving quickly, listening to the whistle, forces you to both look at what’s beside you, and ask what’s inside of you that is making you travel. I hope I never stop looking for the journey.