As an elder Millennial, I still feel hungover from the Great Recession, that loathsome period from 2008 – 2009 when the economy and society itself seemed turned upside-down. Right after graduating college, I was looking for a Pioneer Valley sublet in fall of 2007 and a woman responded to my Craigslist post, offering to rent me an entire Victorian home. I remember her, desperate, saying, “I’m trying to sell the house, so I’m hoping to do month-to-month and you’ll have to clear out occasionally if there is a showing. You don’t think this housing slump is going to last, is it?”
It was in this milieu of severe contraction that the cultural zeitgeist landed on STEM as the solution to our unemployment woes. The problem was that too many people my age had majored in the humanities – too many psychology, history (ahem, me), literature, English, and arts majors for an economy that didn’t want them. The arts were seen as a frivolous indulgence, perhaps done on the side of what you actually did for work. The message was clear: Excel spreadsheets and R and Python and AutoCAAD and all the other buzzy, hip software programs were what you needed to learn.
As I’ve gotten deeper into my planning career, I’ve become more circumspect about the importance of “the soft skills.” Basically all I do during my day is read and write. Emails, reports, memos, document edits. I give presentations and engage in video meetings little different from producing a mini-stage show. The importance of art – the skill of capturing attention and imbuing these work products with compelling narratives and captivating visuals – has snuck back in.
In the midst of this content creation, I thought of this question the other day: Can a Federal compliance report be art?
It seems (and I hope) I’m not alone in thinking about the importance of art. I recently listened to an episode of the American Planning Association podcast (also see this article here) where they interviewed Shane Shapiro to talk about Nashville’s active effort to plan for music districts (e.g., requiring sound proofing). I couldn’t help but think about the wind-down of Gateway City Arts in Holyoke as a performance space and the hole that it will leave. I thought about El Corazon de Holyoke, an ambitious mural project to cover the blank spaces downtown with artwork.
El Corazon de Holyoke mural, with Mayoral Bike Ride participants in the foreground (2023)
I thought about Make It Springfield, a “maker space” where people can create – bicycle repair, soap, paintings, what else? And of course MGM Springfield, a nearly $1 billion investment in the South End of Springfield to realize the vision of a true regional Entertainment District.
While I was in Minneapolis for the National Planning Conference last week, I saw a sculpture that is also a wetland. Why shouldn’t a wetland be art?
Can a wetland be art? Spoonbridge and Cherry Sculpture in Minneapolis, MN
I was in a meeting several years ago to discuss a report that a senior manager wanted to jazz up with graphics. He had heard about these “animated GIFs” and said, “Could we put one of those on the cover?” Younger people laughed at the idea of putting an infinitely looping animated image as the cover of an otherwise dry infrastructure feasibility study. As I think about it now, with the benefit of hindsight, he might have been on to something. Even the mundane can be – should be – fun.
“There ain’t much of a difference / between a bridge and a wall / without me right in the middle, baby / no, you ain’t got nothin’ at all” – Lyrics from “Tear Me Down”, Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Bridges occupy that liminal space in between – neighborhoods, cities, states, nations. They can connect as much as separate, the natural choke points for traffic and often an impenetrable barrier for people walking or biking. At their most banal, they are unnoticed continuations of interstate pavement and guardrails blending into the long monotony of pavement and guardrails. At their grandest, they are spectacular monuments that rise into the heavens.
In that essential work on Robert Moses The Power Broker, Robert Caro describes how Moses fought for bridges instead of tunnels. Tunnels, with their inconspicuous entries and exits and unseeable footprint under water, are only noticed by the people forced to use them. In that sense, bridges are not statements, but are modern ziggurats – not to gods, but to… (whom? Their builders? Elected leaders? The triumph of engineering and vision and domination of man over nature?).
In a more practical sense, bridges are a constant challenge for those charged with keeping goods and people moving. Everyone loves to cut the ribbon on a new gleaming bridge, but the mundane maintenance of those bridges is far less exciting. Bridges are complicated, and the stakes are incredibly high. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge (AKA “Gallopin’ Gertie”) collapsed in 1940 mere months after the ribbon was cut, and the reasons for its oscillations are still being debated. $133 million, adjusting for inflation, tumbling into Puget Sound.
The Aesthetic of Covered Bridges
As I trained for my multi-day bike trip last spring, I decided to put some purpose to my exercise. I happened by a covered bridge in Hardwick in one of my early rides, and I thought a tour of covered bridges was as good a project as any – for whatever reason, they pop up on Google Maps, so wouldn’t be hard to find.
If some bridges stand as an imposing colossus, the humble covered bridge evokes the opposite. It is a symbol not of greatness or triumph, but presented more as bona fides of a small town’s small-town-ness. Hardly practical, questionably safe, seemingly overengineered – their purpose is so opaque that they verge on being an historical curiosity. Why build a roof over a bridge? Why not build it over the rest of the roadway? What is it about a bridge with a roof we find so quaint and charming (as it undeniably is)?
The bridge that most leaned into the quaint New England small town aesthetic was undeniably the Ashuelot Covered Bridge in New Hampshire. A sign indicated that going over the bridge faster than a walk is subject to a $5 fine. This is a statement: you are traveling over the Ashuelot River and you are traveling back to 1864, under penalty of a severe fine (for 1864).
But covered bridges are subject to the same constraints as any other bridge, as much a connection as a potential barrier. When I arrived at the Tannery Bridge in Sandisfield, MA, I found it to be locked up.
Sometimes, there isn’t much of a difference between a bridge and a wall.
My last post covered our experience with heat pumps over the past year, and in the wake of a particularly cold snap. In general, the verdict was a strong “recommend”. For this post, I’ll take a look at the other big electrification investment we made last year – our electric car. As a reminder, we downsized from two hybrid cars to one electric car, made possible because I work remotely and only have to go into the office once per month. So what’s the verdict?
tl;dr The Verdict
Overall, our EV is more expensive than if we had just right-sized from two hybrid vehicles to one, or bought a new hybrid vehicle, even taking into account the state and federal incentives. It also has more limitations despite its relatively long range and fast-charging capabilities compared to a hybrid vehicle. I have no regrets about getting our EV because of the environmental benefits and because it reduces the exposure to fluctuations in gas prices. However, given the price point and operating realities of our EV, it may not make sense for many – or perhaps most – households.
Despite my recommendation having some caveats, from a policy perspective, EVs are a huge win. The air quality benefits alone are substantial; the ability to have a mix of energy sources that feed our grid reduces dependence on any one fuel; and widespread adoption of EVs is criticalif we have any hope of hitting environmental targets. If anything, our experience with the EV has demonstrated the need to continue innovating, experimenting, and investing in this technology.
How We’ve Used It
First, a little refresher on the car we chose. We went with a Hyundai Ioniq 5 as our EV. It’s gotten a number of awards like “Car of the Year” from Auto Express and “EV of the Year” from Car and Driver. Do those awards actually mean anything? I have no idea.
Ioniq 5 (sort of looks like a space ship) Source: Hyundaiusa.com
One of the main advantages the Ioniq 5 has over some other EVs like a Chevy Bolt is the Ultra Fast Charging capability. On 350 kW chargers (also called Level 3 chargers, generally only available from Electrify America), we can take the Ioniq 5 from 20% to 80% in about 15 minutes. For reference, it would take five or six hours to charge that much using our at-home Level 2 charger.
The estimated range on an Ioniq 5 is roughly 300 miles for a full charge, though that depends heavily on the weather and driving style. Given this fast-charging capability and long range, we’ve been able to use it for 99% of our trips. My wife uses it daily to get to Westfield for her job, and I use it once per month to get to Medford (~100 miles one way). I can make it back an forth on one charge, comfortably.
We’ve also taken several short road trips with the car, going to New York City, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. We have to do a little bit of planning to figure out where to stop and charge it, but we typically find a location with a fast charger and time it to when we would want lunch – not a problem at all.
I did take one longer road trip between Holyoke and Kentucky, which wouldn’t have been practical in the EV. It’s about 850 miles, which means stopping at least three times to charge. Assuming I could find a fast charger at appropriate intervals (every 250 miles or so), that’s about 90 minutes of charge time. Tack that onto about 14 hours of driving, and it pushes a one-day trip into a two-day affair. So, I rented a car one-way (again, not a big deal and much cheaper than having a second car).
So, what’s the verdict?In terms of how we’ve used the car, I would give it a solid “recommend” rating. It has met all of our typical travel needs, with minimal inconvenience related to being an EV. Bonus points that we can recharge at home, saving trips to the gas station. However, for a person who uses a car regularly for very long trips, an EV probably isn’t a good option.
Comparing Cost
Cost is more complicated. We purchased the car for just under $50,000, which is important because the Massachusetts EV rebate only applies to cars under that mark. However, we got a $2,500 state rebate and will receive a $7,500 federal tax credit once we file our 2022 taxes, bringing the cost down to around $39,000.
So from a capital investment perspective, it is more expensive than the kind of hybrid car we would otherwise have bought, even taking state and federal incentives into account. But what about the cost to operate?
According to the app for the ChargePoint charger that we have (and got for free from Holyoke Gas & Electric!), it costs about $10 to get 250 miles of range at current electric rates. At $3.50/gallon, the Prius that I used to own cost about $17.50 for 250 miles of driving, and my wife’s Rav 4 hybrid cost about $20. Below is a rough breakdown of the upfront and annual operating costs, assuming 10,000 miles of driving per year.
Assumptions: 1) Ioniq 5 cost after rebates 2) Gas cost of $3.50 3) 10,000 miles per year
I wish it weren’t so, but from a financial perspective, it would have made more sense to stick with the Prius or Rav 4 than switching to an EV. With the Rav 4 Hybrid, it’s nearly a wash – just a couple of grand difference over 10 years. With the Prius, it’s a clear loss, even after the rebate and tax credit.* Of course, the more you drive, the more the balance shifts in the EV’s favor, so this might pencil out better for other households.
Another thing I’ll note is that the cost of a 2023 Ioniq 5 has come down to $43,000 before incentives – though it’s not clear yet whether the 2023 federal tax credits will apply given American final assembly requirements under the Inflation Reduction Act.
So, what’s the verdict? From a cost perspective, sadly, I can’t recommend switching to an Ioniq 5 (maybe other, less expensive EVs would do better). I recently read a Politico “The Long Game” interview [here] with Toyota’s Sustainability Chief, Tom Stricker, who suggested that perhaps the best option is for people to get a plug-in hybrid that gets them to most of their destinations without the gas engine kicking on. That’s an intriguing argument, and one that I want to explore more.
*Without getting too math-y, I will note that I didn’t use a discount rate to account for the time value of money. If I had, the EV would have performed more poorly.
A Repair Postscript
In November, on the way down to Princeton, NJ, I got rear-ended on the highway in Yonkers. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and I was able to drive away. That said, the rear bumper of the Ioniq 5 was totally smashed.
Getting it repaired has been an Odyssey. It is scheduled to go into the body shop next week, nearly three months after the crash, due to parts availability (and further delayed by the holidays and COVID). Once in there, it is likely that the mechanic will find something new once he starts pulling things apart, meaning yet another parts order and potentially weeks or months of more waiting.
On the plus side, it’s been remarkable that the car continues to drive just fine for all of these weeks since the crash. On the downside, the newness of the car means that getting it repaired has been even more complicated than if we had something more standard (like a Prius or a Rav 4). So I don’t think this is anything related to the EV itself, but getting this car fixed has really been a ride. The verdict on repairability is a big thumb’s down (though I don’t know that any other car in the world gets a “thumb’s up” on that).
As I’m writing this, its approximately 11 degrees below zero outside. It was so cold and windy yesterday that one of the hemlock trees in my backyard cracked in half, grabbing our power lines in a precarious tangle and falling into the branches of an adjacent oak tree giant that saved our garage.
Powerlines tangled up in the split hemlock
At the same time, far away from my quiet corner of New England, there is a new Russian offensive in Ukraine, deepening the conflict that – among other terrible consequences – continues to stretch fossil fuel availability and has sent prices skyrocketing.
It’s days like this when decisions around how we power our lives seem most important.
I’ve written some about our effort to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, ranging from installing ductless minisplits throughout the house to switching to a one-car, electric vehicle household. I realized that it’s been about one year since we did both, and I thought it might be interesting to revisit how it’s going.
First, a Great Blog Post Series on High-Efficiency Electric Heat Pumps
I wrote a while back about installing air-source heat pumps (ductless minisplits) throughout the house. As a reminder, these are electric units that use compressors to pull the heat out of the air outside and transfer it into your home, and conversely take the cold out of your home and transfer it to the outdoors. An added bonus is that on hot days they can cool your home (they do this by running in reverse).
My former State Senator Will Brownsberger has recently been posting about his own journey to eliminating natural gas from his home, which has been a great read. You can find it here. Below are the things I found most insightful (and surprising, and at times disappointing).
“Cost reductions and price volatility reductions are not among the reasons to electrify. Even when converting from dirty oil furnaces, the economics are uncertain; a furnace upgrade may be cheaper on a total return basis. ”
This finding from his extensive research and efforts was painful to read, especially since every activist, scientist, policy wonk, and tree hugger agrees that we need to move away from fossil fuels heating our homes. To be clear, I don’t doubt his findings. It’s just hard to square the alarm bells sounding off that we need to ditch fossil fuels with the reality that not only is it expensive, inconvenient, and invasive (as are all home improvement projects) to install heat pumps, but that they also probably won’t save you any money in the near-to mid-term. Here’s the table he used to show typical cost increases:
This was good news to hear, since Holyoke has its own gas and electric utility and is well-known for low rates. Using the Belmont Light electric rates (Brownsberger’s home town), he calculated that he saved $348 on costs annually by electrifying versus using heating oil. Holyoke’s electric rates are lower than Belmont’s ($0.14/kWh versus $0.185/kWh, respectively), so I can assume savings are even better for me.
(As an aside, I didn’t realize that one advantage municipal utilities have over corporate utilities is the ability to enter into long-term contracts. This stabilizes overall costs, which has been a huge advantage this winter as National Grid customers have seen prices soar while municipal utility impacts have been much more muted.)
“[Climate planners] note the cost advantages of partial conversions over whole-home conversions . . . They see partial conversions as the most promising approach to increase adoption rates.”
Brownsberger notes that – like me – most people aren’t going to make the investment to plunge head-first into whole-home conversions to air-source heat pumps, for a variety of reasons. In my case, it was the high capital cost of removing the gas boiler, steam pipes, and radiators from every room in the house, as well as the uncertainty that heat pumps would be able to sufficiently heat our home on the coldest days (like today).
The downside to this approach of partial conversions is that whole-home conversions are critical to achieving climate goals. The race to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius can’t be won using half measures. The best-case scenario is that partial home conversions are a gateway to eliminating fossil fuels in homes, though who knows if they actually will be.
I’ve read this over and over again, and it makes sense to me – replace those windows, add attic insulation, seal cracks, and blow insulation into walls before you make other heating efficiency investments.
The Heat Pump Verdict, One Year Later
Even though installing the minisplits was – like all home improvement projects – expensive and somewhat stressful, my wife and I love our minisplits. The main advantage, which Brownsberger notes repeatedly, is that we now have whole-home air conditioning in addition to heating.
Previously, we had to go through the seasonal process of installing and then removing our window AC units, which was not only annoying, it also looked unsightly to have them sticking out of our windows. One of the window units was so big that I had to tempt, beg, and/or trick whatever friend I could find to help out. I’m glad to be done with that.
In terms of cost, I think it’s been a modest success. Our combined gas and electric bill from mid-November through mid-December 2021 was $260, while the same period for 2022 was $230. Here is the breakdown:
Mid-November through Mid-December
2021
2022
% Change
Natural Gas (CCF) per day
4.65
1.00
-78.5%
Electricity (kWh) per day
29.44
52.31
+77.7%
I expect our natural gas usage to go down even more once we replace our natural gas water heater, which is getting toward the end of its useful life, with a high-efficiency electric one. It’s worth noting that we also now power our EV car through mostly at-home electric charging, which I’ll write about next time.
So what’s the verdict? From an environmental perspective, I fully endorse. It has significantly reduced our use of natural gas, except on the really cold days (like today).
From a cost perspective, I endorse with caveats. Like Brownsberger, I can’t deny that there are large up-front costs that don’t necessarily pencil out in the short- to mid-term, even for those served by a municipal utility. For us, my best guess is that it will take 5 to 10 years to hit the breakeven point from the initial capital investment.
Would I do it again? Absolutely, and in fact am planning in the next year or two to have at least one more minisplit installed to better heat our first floor, which only has one unit for the entire area. If that works out, in the longer term, I am hoping to – like Brownsberger – fully remove our gas-powered heating system and segue into the whole-home conversion our climate plans encourage.
I was talking with a neighbor a few weeks ago, and she asked me if I knew anything about the failed effort to pass a backyard chicken ordinance in Holyoke. She owns several acres of land and is hoping to produce more food on it, though it’s zoned R1 residential (only single-family homes allowed) and in Holyoke, no animals classified as “livestock” are allowed in residential areas. We talked about the effort to pass an urban chicken ordinance, its failure (zone changes require 2/3 majority in cities and towns), and what a shame it is now that eggs are over $5 per dozen.
Urban agriculture has been a growing movement over the last several years as awareness of food insecurity and food deserts has coupled with pandemic-induced urban homesteading. The organization Gardening the Community is a great example in Springfield where youth grow food on vacant lots in disinvested and historically underserved parts of the city.
This movement is especially important in Black and Brown communities which are hit hard by food insecurity. In general, Black and Hispanic households have greater levels of food insecurity, meaning access to affordable, healthy food is an issue of economic and racial justice (see the chart below).
The blue and orange lines show that Hispanic and Black households are have 50% and 100% more food insecurity, respectively, compared to white households. Source: USDA
So that led me to wonder, where are you allowed to own backyard chickens in the Pioneer Valley? And why are there differences between communities?
Where Chickens Are and Aren’t Allowed
Based on my Google search meanderings, the pattern that emerges is one where communities south of the Tofu Curtain are anti-chicken and those north are fine with backyard hens.
There are a few different “flavors” of prohibitions – some require special permits from the city council, some require permits from the Board of Health, and some are outright prohibited in residential areas. Even though there are shades of gray, if a person is struggling to buy groceries, they probably aren’t able to shell out the money for a Backyard Chicken Permit, so it might as well be a prohibition to those households.
So why might it be that Hampshire County is OK with backyard hens and Hampden County isn’t? I have a couple of theories.
Density: The densest communities in the Pioneer Valley are Springfield, Holyoke, and Chicopee. Amherst has a lot of density, but that’s concentrated around UMass and fluctuates with the school year. In a higher-density context, people are more aware of – and sensitive to – the potentially annoying things that their neighbors are doing.
Race and Class: Hampden County is generally poorer than Hampshire County, and also full of cities and towns that blossomed during post-war white flight. These are the same communities that also fail to meet the affordable housing minimum defined in the Commonwealth’s affordable housing law (10% of a community’s housing units defined as affordable). Westfield stands at 7.3%, Agawam at 5.1%, and Longmeadow at 4.7%. If the point of a backyard chicken law is to enhance affordability, these may not be the most sympathetic communities.
People Have a Right to Food
Being prohibited from raising backyard chickens may seem like a small thing, but it’s just one more manifestation of exclusionary practices that have so radically segregated our communities and burdened poor people. On average, American households spend about half their income on housing and transportation and a little over 12% on food – the third-highest expenditure.
A third of household expenditures going to housing is considered the maximum before being “housing burdened”, but poor households spend even more on housing – the poorest households in Massachusetts spend more than two-thirds of their income on housing. When rent and a car payment are taking up most of your income, the ability to grow food could be critical to just surviving – especially when the cost of food has increased an astounding 10.2% over the last year.
The problems I’ve read about backyard chickens – clucking noises and hen manure – seem far milder than the waste and barking that the many, many dogs living around me produce daily, and much less shocking than the mutilated birds and rodents the neighborhood cats leave in our yard. So I find it suspect when a relatively innocuous animal that can make life more affordable for my neighbors is illegal, but other animals that just cost money are A-OK.
For my neighbor’s sake, and for many others hoping to produce healthy food at a low cost, I hope that communities in the region legalize backyard hens. As far as I can tell, backyard hens are a commonsense solution to the rising cost of food, including the eggs we have to buy (right now, anyway) at the store.
More Reading
I wrote a draft White Paper about a year ago on food insecurity specific to Holyoke and Hampden County. Some facts:
Hamden County has the highest food insecurity for children in the Commonwealth.
Latinos are almost twice as likely to live in food insecure households as non-Hispanic white Americans.
Most of downtown Holyoke is considered a food desert (an area with limited access to affordable, healthy food).
As a professional transportation planner, I think about sustainability a lot and and my own transportation carbon footprint even more. When I’m not cursing the smog-spewing system we’ve created, I’m obsessing over how my personal travel choices need to match up with my environmental values. So given my existential dread related to climate change, I guess it was inevitable that our household would get an electric vehicle (EV).
My last post was about the multi-step journey of getting air source heat pumps (minisplits) installed to reduce our use of natural gas for home heating. I thought I would take a different approach with this post and just spit out a bunch of random thoughts I’ve had about getting our EV.
Car resale values are stupid high right now
We owned a 2017 Toyota Rav4 and leased a 2019 Toyota Prius, and the sky-high resale values for used cars (plus our ability to downsize to 1 car) made the EV–buying process so much easier. We were already annoyed with those cars and looking to get something different; we had recently spent $1,000 to get the Check Engine light turned off on the Rav4, and mice kept nesting in our Prius. On top of that, I am generally disgusted with Toyota for its support of a Trump Administration effort to scale back California’s emissions standards – I don’t care if the Prius is the coastal elitist virtue-signaling car of choice, I still wanted to get rid of it ASAP.
So in January 2022, when my wife found a Hyundai Ioniq 5 for sale, we leaped on the opportunity to get it. Because I work from home, downsizing to one car made a ton of sense financially and dealers were more than happy to take our used cars off our hands.
Installing EV chargers is expensive
We knew that we would need to install a 240-volt (level 2) charger at our house. One thing that made purchasing the EV a lot easier was that Holyoke Gas & Electric provided a level 2 charger free of charge with proof of EV purchase (a value of about $700) and also provides $10 off our electric bill monthly if we charge off-peak.
However, electric cars are still probably out of reach for low-income households based on the charger installation cost alone. It cost over $800 to get the (free) charger installed, not counting the electric panel upgrade we already had to do for our minisplits. Meanwhile about 35% of US households aren’t able to cover a $400 expense. And low-income households are more likely to rent, which presents its own challenges – where would you even install a charger if you depend on street parking?
Range anxiety is real
The Ioniq has gotten roughly 250 miles per charge so far this winter, and I’m hopeful that will increase to 300 miles once it warms up. For longer trips, though, that isn’t enough. When my wife and I drove to Brooklyn for a weekend trip, we had to plan out where we were going to plug in since we couldn’t make the round trip on one charge. Fortunately, we can use level 3 chargers that take the car from 20% to 80% in 15 minutes, which meant that the mid-journey stop didn’t have to be very long.
But given the higher cost of an EV, how many people are going to pay a premium to have less long-range mobility? The Biden Administration providing $5 billion for charging infrastructure is a good step; once we get to the point that a person with an EV can go out for a long trip and not have to think about where they are going to charge, that’s when they will be truly competitive.
I don’t really think about gas prices anymore
Now, a couple of months after getting the EV, gas prices have shot through the roof, or so I have been told. Were it not for the constant news stories about it, I wouldn’t know that gas prices are high since I never buy gas. The stability of fuel (electricity) prices for our EV is a major perk, since electric rates are more stable compared to gas prices.
We’re never going to reach EV policy goals at this rate
The Massachusetts 2050 Decarbonization Roadmap notes that in order to make the Commonwealth’s climate goals, 100% of cars will need to be zero-emissions vehicles (primarily battery-electric vehicles) by 2050. I don’t see that happening, unless the cost to install charging infrastructure at home and the abundance of public level 3 chargers both significantly improve, in addition to the cost of the cars themselves coming way down.
After we downsized to one car, I installed an e-bike kit onto my city bicycle, and it’s the best. It has de facto become our second car, and I use it for any local trip under 25 miles (which is a lot of trips). I have biked up steep hills, up and down the valley – it’s extremely versatile and makes biking even in difficult conditions (cold, headwind, etc.) so much easier. We should be promoting e-bikes as an option, too!
Since buying our house in Holyoke in 2016, we’ve been trying to wean it off of natural gas – and wow, it’s hard. One of the reasons I was so excited to buy a home in Holyoke is because of the clean hydro-electricity powering the city. I was also relieved that the house we bought didn’t use heating oil – it’s a disaster for local air quality and requires more boiler cleaning than natural gas.
We wanted off of natural gas because even though it’s cleaner than other heating fuels, it still doesn’t fit into a future that limits climate change. I often hear it talked about as a transitional fossil fuel away from coal and oil, but that seems like an alcoholic switching from whiskey to beer on the way to sobriety. The reality is we have to stop using fossil fuels, natural gas included.
As much as I get preachy about quitting fossil fuels and moving away from natural gas, I felt like a hypocrite living in a gas-heated house. So I did some research and learned a few things:
1. Electric Steam Boilers Aren’t Really an Option
My first obvious thought was what if we just replaced the existing gas boiler with an electric boiler. What little I could find about them suggested that using electricity to heat water into steam just isn’t very efficient and would probably cost a lot more to run. I’m not even sure I could have found an electric steam boiler in the United States (all of the product reviews I found were from the UK).
2. Neither is Converting to a Hot Water System
Another option that our plumber recommended was replacing the steam system with a hot water system, which is more energy efficient. One study showed that switching from steam to hot water increased heating efficiency from 60% to 85%. The problem was that I have a one-pipe system, meaning that I couldn’t use the existing radiators – I would have to do a full replacement (a bigly expense).
Steam enters the radiator, condenses and then runs back to the boiler. Source: HeatingHelp.com
3. Heat Pumps Are Trending
I’ve been seeing more mini-splits (also called air source heat pumps) in friends’ houses and older buildings and also read about them in several climate action plans (including the Massachusetts Decarbonization Roadmap). The plan notes, “Across a wide range of potential futures, electrification of end uses, particularly space heating through the use of electric heat pumps, was found to be the most economically advantageous and cost-effective decarbonization strategy . . .”
Mass Save, the Commonwealth’s energy efficiency program, also provides rebates of up to $10,000 to do a whole- or partial-home conversion. Of course, living in a community with a municipal utility, I’m not eligible for Mass Save, so my rebate was much smaller, but still helped defray the installation cost.
Doing the Installation
Once the research phase was finished, getting the installation completed was a whole series of steps:
Upgrading the electrical service: We needed to upgrade from 100 amp service to 200 amps. Even this step was confusing, one electrician told us that we needed to switch which utility pole the electric line came in from (we didn’t).
Getting quotes for the mini-splits: We got three different quotes which varied widely, and it was a little tough to make a decision because there are so many options in terms of brands and heating/cooling capacity.
Installing the electrical connection: We had to coordinate between the electrician and installers to get an adequate power supply installed in the right spot.
Getting the mini-splits installed: It took a full day with workers all over the house to install the units.
At the end of the day, I’m glad that we made the investment in time and money to get the heat pump installed. However, given how expensive it was and how many steps there were to getting it done, I assume most people wouldn’t have the same level of motivation to do the same. This spells doom for our GHG reduction targets. The Decarbonization Roadmap agrees: “In order to achieve nearterm emissions reduction targets . . . the use of gas for building heat must decline by 2030 and the deployment of heat pump systems must dramatically increase.”
If we really want to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions from building heating, we need to make electric conversion the easiest option – even easier than keeping your old dirty system.
The rent’s too damn high. So true that Rent Is Too Damn High is a political party in New York City. So true that several Democratic presidential candidates have developed federal policy proposals that would reform zoning – an extremely rare federal intrusion into what has historically been seen as a local issue. So true that for the first time in decades rent control legislation is not only being proposed, but actually winning (Oregon, California). But what do we mean when we say “housing affordability?”
Source: Boston Foundation Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2019
Affordability One of Many Housing Problems in Holyoke
I was in my hometown of Holyoke attending a meeting for a community-based organization, Neighbor 2 Neighbor, and we were discussing priorities for the group. We discussed law enforcement, environmental justice and climate change, the quality of schools – none of them raised as much raw emotion as the topic of housing affordability.
The residents of this deeply impoverished part of the Pioneer Valley rattled off a litany of problems under the umbrella of “Housing Affordability”:
Bad Quality: The quality of housing is terrible. Slum lords charge too much money for apartments with faucets that don’t work, windows that won’t close, and walls that are full of mold;
Bad Policy: Federal housing subsidies have way too many strings attached, a big one being a prohibition of people with felony convictions on their records living in public housing. Poor people with felony convictions end up living “informally” with family members, friends, or significant others – making it that much more difficult to complain about bad housing conditions, for fear that they will be found out and evicted;
Bad Safety: Drug dealers and sex workers hang out in the hallways of these apartment buildings, do business out of first-floor windows, and scare other tenants from leaving their apartments. Perversely, even though there is fear about being evicted for having a person with a felony conviction living in your apartment, the building owners won’t act to evict these problem tenants.
Housing affordability is something near and dear to my heart. As I discussed in a prior blog post, the cost of housing was a main reason I left the Boston area. But as the conversation with these Holyoke residents continued, I realized that the problems being discussed were categorically different from the housing issues I complained about while I lived near Boston.
Across all income groups, housing costs in eastern Massachusetts are a burden and only becoming more so. As The Boston Foundation’s Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2019 put it, “Higher income levels in the Boston metropolitan area are still not nearly enough to offset the region’s extremely high housing prices.”
Source: Boston Foundation’s Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2019
It occurred to me that the problem these community members in Holyoke were articulating as “Housing Affordability” was fundamentally different from the issues faced in greater Boston. One of the things that drew me to Holyoke was the low cost of housing. Furthermore, Holyoke and Springfield constitute the two main clusters of affordable housing in the region. Why was housing affordability such a hot topic?
Fortunately, a smarter person than I has already explained this issue. The housing policy expert Jenny Schuetz said the following in an episode of The Weeds podcast:
There are only two partially overlapping housing affordability crises in America, one that affects low-income households in all parts of the country and another that affects a larger share of households in a minority of markets (mostly in coastal metro areas) that suffer from an acute shortage of housing.
Understanding and disentangling these issues is crucial to solving them. The basic problem in greater Boston is that they can’t produce enough housing to meet demand. The basic problem in Holyoke and Springfield is that people are extremely poor, and so housing at any cost is unaffordable.
Different Problems, Different Solutions
The issue faced by greater Boston is underproduction of housing, typically due to land use and zoning policies. Requirements such as minimum lot sizes, minimum parking requirements, separation of single-family and multi-family housing, and prohibition on Auxiliary Dwelling Units all contribute to housing supply unable to keep up with demand.
Create an incentive program of additional funding for communities which build more housing;
Require a City Council or Town Meeting to only have a simple majority instead of a super-majority (2/3 majority) to change zoning code;
Achieve a goal of 135,000 new housing units statewide by 2025.
This legislative push will only minimally impact Gateway Cities like Holyoke and Springfield. There is plenty of housing in Hampden County, although much of it is derelict – apartment buildings and mill buildings which could be converted to condos sit vacant.
Hampden County Poverty Rate. Source: ACS 2017 Five-Year Data
The problem that Holyoke and Springfield face is extreme poverty. The downtown areas in both cities are comprised of neighborhoods where over half of the families are in poverty – annual incomes of less than $26,000 for a family of four. With money that tight, no housing market will ever provide housing that is affordable to these families. And it’s not just housing; food, clothing, toiletries, transportation, medication – all of it is a struggle to afford.
The problem is not housing per se, it is poverty.
Unfortunately, it took decades to sap the wealth out of Springfield and Holyoke, and who knows how long it will take to mend that. Hampden County residents are victims of an international trend pulling resources out of the country’s industrial regions. The zoning and land use legislation proposed by Governor Baker might help families in eastern Massachusetts, but the solution to our problems is much, much more complicated.
It will take nothing less than overcoming systemic racism, reversing the disinvestment in public services and institutions, and eliminating preferential treatment given to large corporations while regional economies collapse. Simple, right?
I recently did 23 and Me, the genetic test that tells you a whole slew of information based on your genome. While there is some debate about the accuracy of the algorithms decoding your DNA, the results more or less confirmed what we already knew from other family ancestry efforts. The results?
Results from 23 and Me
The story passed down through the family is this: The Armstrong clan was a lowland Scottish family that fled to Ireland during the Reformation. Then, a couple of hundred years later, fled to America during the potato famine. It came as no surprise, then, that 23 and Me would find a lot of English and Irish ancestry in my blood.
As St. Patrick’s Day approached, I had this in mind while I put on my green shirt and hat and went to downtown Holyoke to enjoy the celebrations. St. Patrick’s Day weekend in Holyoke is a total blowout party in downtown Holyoke, with a road race, a parade, and no shortage of green knickknacks and beer. Major streets downtown are closed and the whole area becomes a pedestrian mall. I love it.
Holyoke’s Shamrock
It’s no surprise that Holyoke has a strong St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Holyoke was originally called Ireland Parish back before the canals were dug and industry took hold. There was a small Irish enclave in what would become Holyoke, and the factories were built right as thousands of Irish immigrants were flooding into Massachusetts. Holyoke became a magnet for those new Americans.
So Holyoke was an Irish town before it was even a town, and its industries brought even more Irish people (and Polish, and French Canadian, and…). You need look no further than today’s city council to see the continued legacy of its Irish heritage – names like Murphy, McGee, McGiverin, Leahy, Bresnahan.
Of course, Holyoke is not quite so Irish anymore. Today, the city has the largest percentage Puerto Rican population of any American city outside of Puerto Rico. I loved it when one of my favorite restaurants, Holyoke Hummus Company, posted a photo on Instagram on St. Patrick’s Day: “Cafe con leche and Irish soda bread cookies, a match made in Holyoke!”
That got me to wondering, how Irish is Holyoke actually? Luckily, the Census Bureau has ancestry information available by town.
Ireland Parish, Not Quite So Irish Anymore
You can see that Holyoke today is actually one of the least Irish towns in the Pioneer Valley, with just 13.4% of residents claiming Irish ancestry. Chesterfield, East Longmeadow, and Williamsburg lead the pack with about 1/3 of their residents claiming Irish ancestry.
To be honest, this only makes me enjoy the Holyoke St. Patrick’s Day celebration even more. Holyoke has always been a mish-mash of ethnicities and identities. The Irish, Polish, Germans, French Canadians, English, and Puerto Ricans have all left their mark on the city – and all of them, no matter where they were from, were Holyokers.
While St. Patrick’s Day celebrates all things green and Irish, it’s also a day where, “Everyone is Irish.” Just like Holyoke has always been a city where people can come from all over and still be Holyokers, in a way it makes sense that it’s also a place where people can come from anywhere and be Irish – at least for one weekend out of the year.
Following up on my last blog post about the problems at Hampshire College and broader issues facing higher education, I wanted to take a look at the conversation currently going on surrounding K – 12 education. Specifically, I wanted to try to figure out the school funding formula, and why so many people think it’s broken.
Locally Funded Education and Perpetuated Inequality
I already did a blog post about how wildly uneven K-12 education funding is in the commonwealth, ranging from a little over $11,600 per pupil to over $36,000 per pupil. A friend was once opining that if you had to devise a system that perpetuates inequality, then local funding of the education system would be a great way to do it. My wife and I have seen that system in action firsthand. We lived in Belmont, which is one of the wealthiest communities in the state, and also has one of the highest-performing school districts as well.
Moving to Holyoke, which has a school district in receivership, was a shock – the schools need to be renovated, and many families send their kids to parochial schools, charter schools, or opt out to other school districts. The end result is that the students who do attend Holyoke Public Schools are disproportionately low-income people of color who need lots of support in addition to typical classroom instruction.
Of course, the issues facing Holyoke Public Schools are layered on top of years of systemic racism that concentrates people of color into economically disadvantaged, underserved neighborhoods like South Holyoke or The Flats. And a long-term solution must include more economic integration not only in Holyoke, but also in the surrounding wealthier suburbs.
In the meantime, I’ve heard that fixing the school funding formula is a really important first step. School funding from the state has not kept up with the actual cost of providing K – 12 education, meaning an increasing burden is falling to the local communities. Recalibrating it is the only way poor communities like Holyoke can start to catch back up.
State Funding Falling $1 Billion Short
Deep inequities in the K – 12 education system is nothing new in Massachusetts. Back in the early 1990s, a lawsuit was filed by students in poor communities against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The lawsuit alleged that the commonwealth was not meeting its constitutional obligation to ensure a quality education for all residents. The students won.
As described in this report from Harvard’s Kennedy School, this lawsuit pushed the legislature to overhaul how it allocates education funding. State aid to communities through “Chapter 70” was created.
The way the commonwealth allocates funding is a complicated four-step process that few people understand. MassBudget, a non-partisan think tank, has done a lot of work trying to explain how Chapter 70 works. Here is a quick video explaining it.
In brief, the steps are:
Figure out how much funding a school district needs (“Foundational Budget”);
Figure out how much the community should contribute;
Fill in the rest of the funding with state aid;
Communities can elect to fund at an even higher rate beyond the “Foundational Budget” determined in step one.
That would seem like a fair way to allocate state resources, but in the 25 years since Chapter 70 was created, there have been problems. A state commission in 2015 found that the problems with the formula have resulted in the actual cost of education being under-calculated by $1 billion annually. As described in this article, the reasons are:
Health Insurance – Health insurance costs are rising at a rate much higher than inflation, which isn’t taken into account in the Chapter 70 formula. So every year school districts have to under-fund things like art so that they can afford to insure their workers.
Special Education Cost – The school formula underestimates the cost of providing necessary services to special needs students.
English Language Learners – The school formula also underestimates the cost of additional services needed for students who are English language learners.
Taken all together, this results in communities relying more and more on step number 4 (communities taxing themselves beyond the Foundational Budget) to close the gap. Which gets back to the original problem that caused the 1993 lawsuit: wealthy communities can afford a top-notch education system, and poor communities cannot.
Reforming Chapter 70
I’ve been heartened to hear that the Baker Administration is taking a hard look at the formula and wants to update it. Proposed legislation would phase in $1.1 billion in funding over seven years, paid for through a real estate transfer excise tax, a tax on opioid manufacturers, and legalized (and taxed) sports gambling.
Of course, seven years is a long time for a student coming up in Springfield Public Schools, which are currently underfunded by an estimated $90 million. Thankfully, the stars seem to be aligning that 2019 could be the year that state education aid gets reformed. I hope that will move use closer to a future where success won’t depend quite as much on what zip code you happen to be born in.
Pioneer Valley Planner 