Modulars get modern.

Work commitments yet again prevent me from devoting time to lengthy blog posts the way I often would like, but maybe this is a godsend for my readers. My previous post on condo(m)s in Dayton managed to arouse more interest than I’ve achieved in some time. One topic from which I have shied for the most part—probably more than necessary—is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Having lived in New Orleans at the time of the storm and a few years after, I have hundreds of personal photos, as well as more provided by some of my enthusiastic readers, which I included in a recent post featuring the Mississippi Coast. Considering the wealth of opportunity I have for featuring the Gulf Coast photographically, it’s time I explore what I know in depth while remaining sensitive to the swirl of emotions that surround this as-of-yet unsurpassed fiasco (at least in the US). And if I don’t have time to be as sensitive and nuanced as I would like, at least I can be brief.

For the vast majority of the US, the words “FEMA Trailer” conjure an image largely supplied through the extensive media coverage in the early years after the storm: a non-descript white RV that can easily hitch itself to a large vehicle. For the million or two in the Gulf Coast sitting directly within Hurricane Katrina’s path, a FEMA Trailer was just a part of daily life. They were everywhere. In metro New Orleans, you would have been hard pressed to find a street block without at least one perched in the driveway or front yard. Only a shut-in could claim not to see a trailer on a daily basis; a huge portion of the population lived in them, sometimes for years.

Many individuals suffered losses too catastrophic to justify simply “camping out” in their front yards as they repaired their homes. They had to move into “FEMA Villages”—essentially makeshift mobile home parks. These structures were a fair amount larger and less movable than a trailer. Though funded by the government (either leasing the land—or the trailer pads—from a private vendor, or buying it and installing all the infrastructure), the goal was always for these settlements to transition back to private operation, coincident with their residents rebuilding their homes or by moving permanently into these federal villages.

But both the Villages and the Trailers have had their ardent detractors. To many, they were ugly, soulless settlements, more poorly thought-out than New Orleans’ public housing (an achievement in itself) and distributed through an inefficient process. FEMA/Homeland Security built many Villages out of expediency, in places where the land was cheap or readily available, rather than being convenient as a temporary settlement for evacuees. Some of the trailers got lost in bureaucracy and sat languishing in fields in Arkansas, long enough that they could deteriorate. Other naysayers saw FEMA’s Individual Assistance process as a pseudo-solution that fostered long-term government dependency and opportunities for fraud. These critics noted the absence of clearly articulated plans for relocation or eviction after a deadline that the feds pushed back time and time again. The trailers, in turn, were often so flimsy that they’d succumb to the next major storm, resulting in further squandering of public dollars. And individuals on both sides of the political spectrum criticized the sudden public health/public relations debacle two years after the storm, when studies revealed that the levels of formaldehyde were enough to trigger serious and often dangerous respiratory allergic reactions.

Accompanying this pound of cure, however, was an ex-post-facto ounce of prevention. The seemingly sloppily administered government aid after Katrina elicited a variety of smaller, frequently for-profit initiatives attempting to rectify some of the problems posed by FEMA housing peppered liberally across the Gulf Coast by offering alternatives. Various companies attempted to tame Americans’ general aversion toward concrete as a primary construction material in housing, touting its resiliency and low cost of maintenance. Private consultants devised ways to engineer FEMA villages under neo-traditionalist principles so that the infrastructure installed could support desirable long-term mixed use developments vaguely akin to the much ballyhooed resort community of Seaside, Florida (popularized through the movie The Truman Show), after the trailers and mobile homes moved out. Neither of these proposals took off—in fact, they left such a meager ripple that most internet search engines would yield nothing. Slightly more successful—and a non-profit venture—were the aesthetic alternatives to FEMA trailers known as Katrina Cottages: cheery, affordable little structures built much more durably than typical mobile homes, intended to withstand strong winds, offer highly efficient storage as an antidote to small square footage (usually under 700), and in keeping with the architectural vernacular of New Orleans’ pastel single shotgun homes. One city in particular, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, pioneered the Katrina Cottage community by leasing a few acres adjacent to downtown to host a small cluster of these much heralded residential alternatives.

The Katrina Cottage was a drop in the bucket amidst the flood of federal housing assistance (an ill chosen pun, I know). It could hardly compete as anything more than a niche market when it had only a fraction of working capital of such juggernauts as FEMA and HUD. But Ocean Springs also hosts the innovative, privately initiated solution I saw last summer, five years after the storm, when most other affluent homeowners along the Gulf had either fully rebuilt or thrown in the towel completely. But this home just blocks away from the Mississippi coast was still undergoing repairs.

The glare from my car’s windshield doesn’t help things, but the configuration is the same one you might have seen on the Gulf Coast just two or three years earlier: a mobile home poised in the middle of the front yard, with the permanent home partially hidden behind it. Approaching it from the other direction better reveals the relationship between the two structures:

This home is close enough to the water that it clearly could be influenced by violent storm surge; it might even be vulnerable to an uncommonly strong tidal surge. The elevation of the foundation is probably nothing new—most houses nearby have been raised—but the length of the supportive piers is probably greater than before. The first of the two photos reveals that the garage was a conventional one, which, it would appear, the unusual elevation has now rendered useless as a carport. But the most notable feature here is that modular unit out front. By most judgments, it looks a far lot comfier, sturdier, and more attractive than a FEMA trailer. Could the homeowners have been inspired by what they saw elsewhere in Ocean Springs, through the winsome Katrina Cottages less than a mile away? I can’t help but think so. It’s highly likely the improvements to the main house no longer have anything to do with disaster recovery. After all, Katrina struck five years prior, and the deadline for Individual Assistance applications has long since expired. Still, the owner may have liked the approach of living off his or her infrastructure on personal property while making significant changes to the home. Those homeowners with the wherewithal for something nicer are likely to seek an upgrade from the spartan, formaldehyde-laced FEMA trailers. The result is a structure like this: still highly efficient but much easier on the eye, and probably more durable too. And it is likely far more movable than the average modular home.

The clichéd crisis/opportunity dichotomy can’t help but ring true. Not only does it take a cataclysmic event to shake the populace out of complacency (which is precisely what we had become in our relation to hurricane evacuation and general emergency preparedness prior to Katrina), but it takes further muddling through the solution to discover that a mitigating approach would have borne more utilitarian fruit in the long run. Although the median home size has shrunk over the past few years (for the first time in recorded US history), we aren’t yet exactly considering the Katrina Cottage, much less the modular home, as the typical piece of the American Dream. But we are coming closer to parity than ever seemed possible before the bubble burst. Average household sizes have been shrinking for decades: since more people live alone, it is probable that they will, at least in aggregate, demand less space. The Katrina Cottage or the smartly accoutered FEMA trailer may someday seem less like an idiosyncrasy and more like a brilliant act of foresight—a widely cheered solution within a persistently dour housing market.

Dressing the wounds with paint.

My suspicion is that the majority of the readers here have at least a vague knowledge of the Broken Windows Theory, and how it can apply across a variety of social contexts. For the unacquainted, it’s simple: an inanimate object showing signs of neglect or a general lack of maintenance invites the further degeneration of its own physical condition, because the perpetrators causing further damage safely assume that the lack of stewardship will preclude any consequence to acts of vandalism. In short, if a building lets a single broken window remain unrepaired for long, in due time all the windows will end up broken. Shattering glass, is quick, easy, and usually anonymous; for those seeking a deviant outlet, it’s hard to think of a better option. Even graffiti—probably the next most popular means of exemplifying the Broken Window Theory—still requires the procurement of a certain object, the spray paint can, which investigators could easily trace to the perpetrator. Breaking a window can involve anything one finds on the ground. So in a structure perceived to be abandoned or long ignored, the windows are usually the first to go, then the graffiti artists tag it, and before long, thieves have most likely plundered it of all its copper.

Only a few large American cities are lacking in a certain district with a high concentration of abandoned structures. In some, the abandonment is relegated to the most disinvested areas; others are replete with them across the entire city limits. All too often, the diminished tax base that arises from a collection of unused buildings robs the city leaders of the best tools for tackling blight and abandonment, whether in the form of demolishing the most neglected buildings, restoring them, or—as is often the case—“securing” them by boarding up those windows. Plywood boards are frequently the first line of defense: they’re cheap, they effectively deter window breakers, and they pose a barrier for burglars. But they’re ugly, by most people’s perceptions. And they flag a structure as abandoned far more boldly than those without the boards; a building is obviously abandoned even from a distance if the windows are boarded, far more so even than if they’re uncovered and most are shattered.

And boarded windows essentially serve as a promotional canvas for graffiti artists. Already flagged as abandoned, the boards encourage those already enticed by delinquency to leave a mark on a hardened shell that is by this point reasonably impenetrable. A talented graffiti artist may create a breathtaking display on the side of the building, but the market tells us that graffito-strewn areas generally suffer far lower property values than those that lack it. (A more sociological assessment would surely reveal that it’s a chicken/egg dilemma, and the concomitant social problems in low income areas encourage abandonment and thus attract graffiti.) Regardless of the origins, securing vacant buildings with plywood may result in a stalemate: the boards amplify as many of the visual consequences of deviant behavior as they deflect.

Some communities have attempted other outlets at staving off blight by providing at least a rudimentary level of stewardship to their abandoned buildings beyond plywood. Camden, New Jersey is a city that, after decades of deindustrialization, has suffered far more disinvestment and abandonment than most, along with a heavily impoverished tax base that often stymies the City from being able to fund blight management. The image below reveals what I suspect is a civic-led initiative to mitigate the eyesore effect of those boards.

The photo comes from the neighborhood center of Fairview, the southernmost part of Camden. Three story multi-family housing surrounds a central park-like square in which I’m standing, flanked by first-floor retail at the corners (seen on the left in this photo). Despite the obvious signs of disinvestment, Fairview is still a curiosity in Camden: it was originally conceived in the 1910s as Yorkship Village, a carefully planned community of curvilinear streets, abundant shared green space, an inward-turning and self-sustaining neighborhood character, and a reasonable price range for its architecturally uniform rowhouses (and the occasional detached home). In short, it was a prototype for the Garden City, modeled after Ebenezer Howard’s conception that came to fruition in the form of Letchworth and Welwyn workers' communities in the UK just a few years prior. The Garden City movement never grew beyond a curious experiment on either side of the pond, but the surviving examples remain interesting footnotes to urban planners and scholars, while certain features to Garden Cities like Yorkship Village/Fairview have retained their cogency as manifested in the design of some suburban apartment blocks or Traditional Neighborhood Development (New Urbanist) projects across the country.

As Camden began sinking into a seemingly ineluctable economic decline caused by rapid deindustrialization in the mid-1900s, Fairview managed to hold its own for decades as a stable working class and lower middle class enclave. Cut off from the rest of the city by both an interstate highway and a creek, the only way for vehicles to reach Fairview was through the economically healthier city of Gloucester City to the south. As our tour guide told us from her experience growing up in the 1950s and 60s, it was like Mayberry—an analogy so popular that no further explanation is needed. Fortunes changed for Fairview in the 1980s, when the City of Camden built a bridge across the north branch of the Newton Creek, connecting it to the rest of the city. The City of Camden also absorbed Fairview into its school district. Previously, Fairview’s children had attended Gloucester City public schools; at the stroke of a pen, the city leadership shepherded Fairview’s student population into one of the worst performing districts in the state. The desirability of Fairview immediately plummeted—attributable more, I suspect, to the shifting school district than the construction of the bridge—and the community’s residents began selling their homes en masse. Within just a few years, this previously overwhelmingly white community with little poverty came to mirror the demographics and socioeconomics of the rest of Camden. The result is the same widespread abandonment visible throughout the rest of the city, seen in a photo below where I pivoted slightly to the right from the prior one:

Fairview remains one of highest-income census tracts in Camden, despite the fact that its socioeconomics place it significantly below the New Jersey average. A fair number of homes in Fairview may be boarded up, but few have been demolished. Virtually none are in danger of collapse. The same cannot be said of elsewhere in the city, which I featured in a blog post long ago. The rest of Camden ranks consistently as both the most crime-ridden and impoverished city in New Jersey as well as one of the worst in the country. Abandonment is everywhere; tall grass waves across the copious fields where much of the housing stock is already long abandoned.

These pictures are by now fairly old, taken about eight years ago. But Camden’s rank as a socioeconomic cellar dweller prevails. And though I haven’t visited Fairview in as many years, I suspect its status as Camden’s “healthiest” neighborhood endures as well. As superficial as it may seem, those painted boards on the first floor windows of the building at Fairview’s town center provide ample evidence: it’s the only place in a city replete with plywood where some agent has made the effort to spruce them up. It very well have been the Fairview Historic Society, the agency that provided us with a tour of the town and the anecdotes; it could have been a church group; it may be the product of an initiative from an independent activist. I don’t know what these buildings look like now, but at the time of these photos, the disinvestment in Fairview appeared far more recoverable than elsewhere in Camden: fewer broken windows, less graffiti, minimal structural compromise of the sort that would necessitate demolition. Though still distressed by most measurements, Fairview is indisputable less blighted than most of the rest of Camden. One could perhaps argue that Fairview declined much later than the rest of Camden; it’s still slightly better off and not yet visibly beyond hope of improvement, so of course the appearance is better. But abandonment can age structures remarkably quickly, and the twenty years or so that Fairview has ceased attracting middle class families is more than enough time for vandals to have broken the windows and plundered the interior piping. The painted boards here aren’t much. Many of them simply and crudely mimic what the windows would portray if the rooms inside still had inhabitants: flowers in vases, air conditioner window units, perched cats, people staring back out. But Fairview has a few more pairs of eyes and hands that are voluntarily keeping it afloat. Its unique configuration as a Garden City prototype may not have been enough to salvage it from its host municipality’s decline, but it would be hard to argue that it remains the neighborhood in Camden most likely to enjoy a renaissance.

One other city featured in this article that has attempted to minimize the impact of its abandonment through a brush and acrylics has fought back from a completely different hostile force—not deindustrialization, but the natural fury of a hurricane. Long Beach, Mississippi sits on the Gulf Coast, just east of the much larger and better-known cities of Gulfport and Biloxi. It has hosted a satellite campus of the University of Southern Mississippi, with a number of structures just feet from the beach.

The Category 3 & 4 winds and the storm surge induced by Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the Mississippi Coast, the other regional victim of a catastrophe in which New Orleans’ fate dominated international press coverage. The Gulf Coast didn’t marinate in floodwaters for weeks on end, the way New Orleans did; the overwhelming majority of the damage occurred overnight, so that recovery could begin within days. But the irrecoverable losses on the coast may actually be more severe: while many homes in New Orleans could be refurbished after they had been gutted and treated for mold, only foundations remained for a considerable number of Mississippi structures.

This Administration Building fared better than many other directly fronting the shore in Long Beach. Regardless of whether it is structurally intact, it is still standing. Though new buildings have risen since the storm, the majority of the Long Beach campus remains unrestored. Since this photo series was taken in June of this year, almost six years after Katrina—by veteran photographer Nici English—it is clear that the admin building has not been a demolition priority for the university. Plans to renovate it may be pending: though weathered looking, it does not show any indications that it is of eminent danger of collapse. And each one of the boards on the windows has a unique painting—though none are a surefire successor to Matisse, some show at least a moderately high level of skill and time commitment.

Similar to the apartment building in Camden where only the first-floor windowboards received artistic attention, only the front side of the USM Admin Building received a paint job; on one of the other sides, the windows are unsealed.

Like the building in Camden, few, if any, of the windows are broken—graffiti is nowhere to be seen. Long Beach is not an epicenter of deindustrialization the way Camden is, which means that the social ills that often elicit vandalism and other deviant behavior are not looming large in Long Beach the way they are in New Jersey’s poorest city. But graffiti can appear in a moderately unattended building in a cozy, affluent suburb just as easily as a community plagued by poverty or natural disaster; an intruder can break a window in an occupied house. But both criminal acts are more likely to occur on property that is unmonitored, even if only temporarily. The painting of boards on windows, though hardly a panacea to blight, provides a much-needed stamp of stewardship that may repel vandals from a building’s unbroken windows the way cedar repels moths from wool.

MONTAGE: Curbing destruction by rethreading the button.

I'm back from a lengthy time away from Afghanistan and have been trying to plug away at another blog article that incorporates infrastructure from several different countries, as well as the implications on American energy efficiency. But, as is often the case, a shortage of good, specific photos has become my Achilles' heel. I will acquire the remaining photos that I need before too long, and that article is already more than halfway complete, but until then I offer a novelty for my blog: a montage in which I didn't take a single one of the many photographs. I must give heaps of credit to Nici English for providing me not only with the pics—taken hastily from her car through the driver's window, just as I would do—but also with the background information on a subtle but interesting subject: curb jumping.

Notice anything? I probably wouldn't have either. But our star photographer understands the trucking industry firsthand and can clearly spot what I would have completely ignored.

More than one vehicle has attempted to negotiate the turn into this Cracker Barrel outside Caseyville, Illinois, but it would take a heck of a heavy car—and a painfully inept driver—to cause the sort of skimming of the edge of the concrete that you see here. But for a trucker, it's much more understandable. The weight they support and the extensive spatial judgment that they require will inevitably result in some slip-ups. The truck parking in the background of the above photos indicates that the area consciously accommodates truckers; no doubt the property owner also expected the sharp turns would pose problems for some in the industry and paved a curb in order to minimize landscaping damage—which, in turn, results in a damaged curb.

Most corner-cutting and curbside damage comes from a single culprit: the inexperienced trucker, negotiating a space that is simply too small. Understandably, a trucker's ability to handle such a lengthy vehicle only grows through time and experience; more surprisingly, the vast majority of truckers do not last six months in the industry after an initial training. According to English, my online expert, even among the largest trucking companies (Swift, JB Hunt), it would be reasonable to assume that 50% of the drivers have less than half of a year of experience. The result? Lots of scratched curbs, stripped corners, and shredded landscaping.

Many property owners in high truck traffic areas have learned to anticipate these vehicular assaults on their pavement, grass, and landscaping; they have devised a sort of defense. Not surprisingly, a Motel 6, also in the Caseyville area, obviously has to contend with curb jumpers quite a bit.

Large rocks planted at the corner serve the same purpose that they do in residential neighborhoods—to deter motorists who make that turn carelessly. In some cases, these boulders do more than just preserve landscaping aesthetics; they save a valuable piece of infrastructure, such as the fire hydrant below.

The above photo shows the Motel 6 from a different angle—one with a visible drop yard for trailers in the background, which explains the need for such extensive fortification. On the other side of the street, the property owner has chosen a more aggressive—and, in my opinion, uglier—barrier for curb jumpers. They look like overturned bollards, and they seem to be safeguarding what is likely a fragile little wetland.

Not surprisingly, these rocks are particularly prominent at motels along highways that would prove popular destinations for truckers. Here's an installation near Grenada, Mississippi, where the more prominent positioning of the rocks suggests that they are not there just to deter curb-jumping but to alert truckers of a tight corner—which, I'll admit, pretty much amounts to the same thing semantically.

The absence of barriers can often prove more harmful than merely tearing up a patch of grass. A particularly clumsy trucker clocked this light post outside a Caseyville hotel while trying to turn a corner.

Viewed from a different angle, it is clear many other drivers scoured the grass along the curb before one took it an increment further.

Understandably, state and local governments have not improved every road in these often rural environments to the degree that it has a curb. The absence of one would make it difficult if not impossible for a trucker to notice when he or she has turned too sharply.

The example below, again from Caseyville, shows what appears to me like a more serious accident waiting to happen: a curbless street near a trailer drop yard, in which the drivers skimming over into the verge can come within a hair's breadth of clipping that thick yellow cable.

The cable could be stabilizing a number of tall objects—a power line among them. Bollards or rocks placed right along this curve would be a cheaper and most likely more effective solution than building a curb: the introduction of an unexpected obstacle is far more likely to attract attention than a continuous curb that a trucker could cross complacently.

Putting the alliteration aside (in a minute), the trucking technique that tries to terminate the tendency for curb jumping is known as button hooking. We've all seen it on the back of trailers: “Caution—this vehicle makes wide right turns.” The blog entry on Hub Pages by Omniscient Nomad illustrates this effectively:

As Omniscient Nomad explains, in Figure A, the driver did not allow himself or herself sufficient time and space to prepare for the right hand turn. In these instances, the fishtailing trailer may cross into three (if not all four) lanes in an intersection of two-way streets, forcing other drivers to back up to give enough room. Figure B shows a correct button hook, minimizing the likelihood of curbing or concurrent calamity by colliding with cars nearby.

The trucking industry may seem like it owns the road, but, as all of us have seen (even if we don't always notice) trucks are generally subject to many higher restrictions than conventional automobiles, whether it be through weigh stations, restricted tunnels, lower speed limits, or just outright prohibitions, such as this mildly ironic sign near Durant, Mississippi.

The owner of the gas station has determined the space is too constrained to allow for trucks—but not for livestock trailers, which are approximately half the length of a conventional 53-foot commercial trailer.

And another bit of near irony with trucks and signage rests outside Osceola, Arkansas:

Alas, it was a storm and not a curb jumper that took this one down. How do we know? The landscaping below it, while unkempt, is hardly mangled. Trucks are not exactly the most benign presence on America's roadways, but they would likely prove a lot more threatening if they could ascend, accelerate, maneuver, or halt with the same freedom and abandon as virtually every smaller vehicle can do. Rocks, curbs, and bollards are a modest remedy to a curbing problem that is equally modest, especially in light of trucks' capacity for both destruction and amazing productivity across American roadways. The gestures of trucks are big, so it is apt that something so comparatively simple could be explained metaphorically through a mere button.

There was a parking lot...now it's a peaceful oasis.

Hardly a month goes by—perhaps more like once a week—without some new artistic endeavor depicting contemporary life synecdochically through paved surfaces. We can all think of one. Whether the first that comes to mind for you is a song by Joni Mitchell (or maybe David Byrne), a Terry Gilliam movie, or a Kurt Vonnegut novel, the world today has been smeared across by some paving surface—or so they'd have you believe. Granted, most of these examples, by virtue of the fact that they criticize this phenomenon, share a certain political leaning (and, most likely, a dense big city that they call home), but the fact remains that modernity and concrete or asphalt share a loose fungibility: the phrase “paving the way” implies progression, or, at the very least, succession.

Is it justifiable to bemoan the fact that the earth, in totality, is most likely becoming increasingly impervious with each passing second? Even the greatest Luddites can hardly complain over the fact that, a century ago, most roads outside of urban centers in the United States—the nation with the largest road network by far—were dirt or gravel at best. After all, a hard surface that resists most weather patterns is unambiguously superior for travel, and individual mobility is better than ever before, with all evidence that it only stands to improve in the future (even if perhaps at a higher cost per unit traveled). These broad artistic swipes at our increasingly paved future generally achieve satire and a resonant message, more readily than a dire warning of eminent peril. At least they make for a catchy tune or a cult novel/movie. Nonetheless, most people simply do not allow the cement trend to bother them; perhaps they even welcome it as an indicator of improved convenience. And perhaps the fact that so much of the world still remains unpaved—sometimes completely removed from human intervention—that a dystopic future devoid of natural plant growth can only achieve resonance in the topos root of the aforementioned word: we do indeed have a “place” here in the future that is simultaneously the present, but it is hardly so devoid of all that is green and pure to be dys, or “bad”.

Maybe it is legitimate to claim that the world is increasingly paved, but a thousandth of a percentage's incremental increase still smacks of hyperbole. Even in most urban environments, plant life is abundant—sometimes more so than the unsettled world around it (particularly noticeable in my current home here in Afghanistan, where trees are non-existent except in well established towns). So the collision of the built and the natural ultimately isn't as bleak as Mitchell and Vonnegut would like us to think it is. Sometimes the harmony between the two is so unexpected that it is particularly charming, as in this eminently suburban streetscape in Gulfport, Mississippi:


Aside from blurring people's faces to leave them anonymous, I'm not normally one to doctor my own photos. But I couldn't help but try to capture the serenity of this live oak by at least toning down the ordinariness of the surroundings. So I confess: I “Photoshopped” out some of the signage. Here's the actual vista of this tree:


There it sits, right in the middle of a grocery store parking lot. The Southern live oak is one of the most emblematic trees of the South. I suspect that only the magnolia surpasses these expansive titans for evoking the ecology of Dixie, particularly in a place like Mississippi—nicknamed the Magnolia State. But the magnolia is the name for a genus, a broader classification than the specific Quercus virginiana of the Southern live oak—not surprisingly, the magnolia family of trees covers a much broader geographic region. (By the same token, the live oak characterizes a broader Quercus genus as well; the Quercus virginiana, or Southern live oak, is the specie of focus here.) The Southern live oak generally thrives in exclusively the coastal Southeast, making it most characteristic of the Deep South, whereas magnolias can endure as far north as Philadelphia. It is common practice—almost a cliché—for artists/filmmakers/photographers to show American “Southern-ness” through a silhouette of a grove of Southern live oak trees, with Spanish moss draped lazily across the horizontally inclined branches. Not surprisingly, Southerners by and large revere these trees, in part for their tremendous canopy, their idiosyncratic evergreen characteristics (they are never without leaves), and their ability to withstand hurricane-force winds. The streets of New Orleans, Savannah, and (prior to Hurricane Ike) Galveston all derive the majority of their canopy from these trees. One of the most prominent old plantation homes in Louisiana is the beloved Oak Alley, featured in many movies, as well as this blog quite some time ago.

So, if these trees are so pervasive, what makes this one so special? As is clear from the photos, it is in what is otherwise a pretty unremarkable parking lot to what seems to be a run-of-the-mill southern grocery store chain.

If the photos have not made it obvious already, this particular Southern live oak is big. Huge.

Though I didn't take any measurements, I really didn't need to in order to assert that it's bigger than most if not all of the Southern live oaks in New Orleans neighborhoods. Thus, it's safe to assume that, by virtue of its greater size, it's also older than the 150 year old plantings that line St. Charles Avenue in the Big Easy. In fact, I would venture to guess that this tree is comparable in size to the Southern live oaks in Oak Alley Plantation, which, in turn, were planted over three hundred years ago. Carrying this deduction a step further, I suspect that this tree is of a similar age, which would date it a good 180 years prior to the incorporation of the City of Gulfport in 1898.

And, as gutsy as it may be for me to assert this, this Southern live oak may even pre-date the Winn-Dixie! Most of the development around this part of Gulfport, based on the appearance of the homes, comes from the 1960s through the 1980s, a era when automobile-oriented design and parking lot provision were often at their most generous. Relatively few subdivisions that originate from this time have sidewalks, particularly if they were platted outside of an incorporated area. Developers of commercial plazas focused little on aesthetics or preservation of green space; the biggest amenity of a strip mall was its abundance of free, plainly visible parking.

Yet shifting consumer tastes have elicited a gentle irony: many of these 40-year-old strip malls are now struggling with high vacancy levels, having been replaced by lifestyle centers and other retail typologies that emphasize aesthetics in general—and greenery in particular—much more than in the past. In most municipalities, the inclusion of some form of landscaping is mandated for parking lots over a certain minimum size. The US Green Building Council's Version 3 of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for New Construction and Major Renovations provides multiple incentives for developers to “break up” an expansive sheet of pavement through trees and landscaping, partly to facilitate stormwater management by reducing impervious surfaces, but also to help minimize the urban heat island effect, largely induced by pavements and other aggregate materials that retain heat. Both of these negative characteristics of conventional parking lots can pose a huge burden and source of discomfort in a hot and rainy climate, such as southern Mississippi in the summer.

But somehow I suspect that ecologically sensitive stormwater management and heat island mitigation were not on the developer's mind when building this Winn-Dixie. First of all, if this store is as old as most of the housing and commercial establishments in this area, its construction precedes that of city ordinances mandating landscaped islands, LEED certification, and the green building movement altogether. The installation of landscaped islands is hardly consistent throughout this parking lot. Some other angles reveal that most of the rest of the lot is barren and exclusively impervious...

...with the exception of the perimeter, which hosts islands with significantly younger plantings.

These perimeter trees were most likely a private decision and not a public mandate. At any rate, their existence depended on development of this site; obviously they didn't grow in this pattern by nature. Parking lot landscaping has become particularly prevalent in the last decade, induced by a combination of municipal codes and—perhaps most potently—market forces: developers have found that strip malls/lifestyle centers/shopping plazas attract the eyes of passers-by through their inherently more upscale appearance. Treeless strip malls look old-fashioned, tired, and barren in comparison.

In fact, upon further scrutiny, aesthetics may actually be the single greatest justification for these landscaped islands, because the ecological benefit is increasingly dubious. While they undoubtedly provide at least some shade and relief from the heat island effect that makes Mississippi parking lots so uncomfortable in the summer, the cost of maintenance may outweigh the benefits, particularly if the installation uses landscape or trees that demand a great deal of water or irrigation, further skewing the natural hydrology of a site. A not-so-recent article of Urban Development observed that because so many of these landscaped islands seem like afterthoughts to accompany a stormwater management system of pipes and culverts, the islands do not achieve a great deal of their mitigating effect. In addition, passers-by routinely trample the ground cover, the islands aren't big enough for the root systems to grow, and catch basins collect much of the water before it permeates the soil for the trees. Thus, the street trees often die within a decade. (These shortcomings are undoubtedly one reason why LEED encourages xeriscaping, or drought resistant plant cultivation, in any stormwater management system, with more emphasis on vigorous, natural landscaping to reduce the need for catch basins.)

Regardless of what inspired these much younger perimeter tree plantings, they do not fit in with the mighty old live oak.

They belong to a different pattern, and the big tree is an exception to this. Were the developers that saved this tree were motivated by something else: a love for this tree in particular? They sacrificed at least four parking spaces for it, but in the process salvaged what almost manages to serve as a landmark for the area. The “island” is more like Australia (or at least Madagascar), providing ample space for the live oak's sprawling, generally superficial root system. They didn't try to jam additional landscaping at the ground of the tree, which would most likely not survive for lack of water and sunlight, or it would flourish on its own terms but rob the mighty tree of its nutrients. Whoever conceived this may not have been an expert arborist, but he or she was not likely a mere amateur either.

The titanic tree flourishes thus far, after having been surrounded by asphalt for at least two decades and probably much more. And in all likelihood, it will outlast its much younger cousins, who were given the poorly thought-out treatment that Len Zickler and Duane Dietz rail against in the aforementioned Urban Development article. These smaller trees—also Southern live oaks, I believe—are jammed into much smaller islands, sometimes two at a time. Some rust colored mulch and compost undoubtedly try to endow them with the nutrients they need but otherwise are not receiving. Chances are strong that the will succumb to their poor environment within the next few years. But, if it's lasted this long, the older cousin will most likely persevere into the distant future.

This anomaly—an old-growth tree in a settlement less than 40 years old—proves that not everything those talking heads (pun intended) satirize about modernity is not entirely fair. The artists who denigrate the paving of America routinely target suburbia in particular—take the examples mentioned at the beginning of this post, or, a much more recent one, Win Butler. And these suburban-critics would have us believe that leaving the city is predicated upon a hostility to both the old (aging architecture) and the natural (the desire to get around everywhere through a gas-guzzling vehicle). But keep in mind that the original inspiration for suburban living was a return to nature, often not by the middle class but by the gentry who could afford the greater travel costs. Today, an overwhelming number of Americans continue to prove by their buying (and foreclosing) patterns that they'd prefer a big yard, even if it means the houses are spaced so far apart that they have to drive ten minutes to buy a can of Coke. Sure, that big green expanse might have the biodiversity squelched through fertilizer and pesticides, but it is a perception that it is far more natural that closely packed urban living. A lawn is certainly not impervious like a tightly packed urban streetscape. And a city park is rarely any more of a realistic, natural ecosystem than a suburbanite's manicured back yard.

Here, in Gulfport, one can witness veneration for both the old and the natural in this preservation of a long-standing Southern live oak tree. It does happen now and then. The distinctions between between rural and urban—the synthetic and the natural—the modern and the pre-modern—the good and the bad—get hamfisted treatment by both the city artists/intellectuals and the designers of giant new exurban subdivisions. And, long after the polemic ends and the two sides have died of exhaustion, years after some technological advancement renders the Winn-Dixie (and all grocery stores) obsolete, this tree will continue to stand, enjoying increased breathing room amidst the cracked and decaying pavement. It used to be real estate; now it's only fields and trees.

Dividing the loyalties at the bumper.

While I continue to sift through articles and scholarship on neighborhood associations in my free time, I’ve come to realize I’ve let the posts lag a bit too much. So I offer a quick rumination on a topic I love but haven’t featured much: license plates. Some states doggedly adhere to a certain design over the years; Minnesota and Delaware come to mind for offering the same appearance for the standard plate for as long as I can remember. Other states refresh their plate design routinely: Ohio, Indiana, and Mississippi generally feature a new look every two to three years. In addition, some states only offer a few specialty plates; again, Minnesota and Delaware seem particularly consistent in this regard. They may offer plates for veterans and environmentalists, but the variety is relatively limited. Indiana and Mississippi, again, offer so many designs that it’s hard even to identify the standard.

But now I must provide a quick snapshot from a license plate I have only seen twice—once in New Orleans and once (here below) in Gulfport. Chances are slim that it’s from the same car, but it’s hard to imagine there are too many other examples of these out there:

This strikes me as among the strangest specialty plates that a state can offer: one featuring a university (Louisiana State) that differs from the parent state featured on the plate (Mississippi)! I can certainly understand states offering plates for alums from the key university in state, but why would a state offer plates with the logo and motto of one of the most prominent rivals? While I’m sure this isn’t the only example—the Plateshack website above features a Delaware specialty with the West Virginia University logo—this is the only example I have seen in person. Louisiana and Mississippi share a border of more than two hundred miles, much of it focused upon the nation’s most prominent river. Their shared cultural ties to the Deep South are unquestioned. And it probably is more common for a Louisiana State University alum to live in Mississippi than, say, Vermont. But the Academic Common Market from the Southern Regional Education Board reveals a significant number of reciprocal agreements for academic programs between the two states: thus, a resident of Mississippi can enroll in certain departments at LSU and still only pay in-state tuition.

It may be bold to say that this spirit of cooperation extends to Departments of Motor Vehicles, but Mississippi most likely does not owe Louisiana enough to feature the Pelican State’s pre-eminent state university on the back of cars licensed and registered in the Magnolia State. But clearly it happens, and I’m sure a keen eye would find a car that features the opposite—a Mississippi university on a Louisiana plate. The culture of license plates’ design and content seems to be shifting away from centralized, authoritarian control across the country, as increasingly more flexible, diverse plate designs add to the aesthetic palette, even in comparatively staid plate states like Minnesota. A simple search for Department of Motor Vehicles yields privately owned sites like these, suggesting that the private sector passively allows some mild outsourcing of this branch of government. We may eventually get to the point where the combined culture of (increasingly popular) vanity plates and specialized designs work to eliminate the significance of a state’s original or flagship plate. If states continue to feature content from their neighbors just as Mississippi has, it could over time erode the significance of identifying cars by their parent state. I know this is a complete stretch, but it may even become meaningless altogether to list the state name on a car—the plate number and the design could be enough. As long as the plates retain a high degree of individuality it would hardly seem to disrupt the cultural order: after all, what better place for Americans to announce to the world their emotions, vocations, and ideals than on their bumpers?

Butts in the loo.

In many ways, this study serves as a companion piece to the previous blog entry. Both articles explore a social phenomenon that has swept the nation, largely manifested through increasingly palpable policy justified by the goal of providing for the common defense or promoting the general welfare. The previous post, scrutinizing passenger screening at airports to prevent terrorist attacks (the common defense), examined how the laborious and increasingly invasive security procedures not only inconvenience passengers but the airports themselves, depriving the Roanoke Municipal Airport of an entire gate. And this article looks at a potential “pushback”—perhaps the funniest I can find—against the increasingly mainstream indoor smoking bans (the general welfare).

Though it may seem trite to assert that anti-smoking ordinances have taken the nation by storm, the fact remains that the laws in place today in virtually every state would have been unthinkable even thirty years ago. The Atlantic magazine recently chronicled some of the earliest bans, from the global Papal fiat of 1624 that banned tobacco because it prompted sneezing—which in turn resembled an orgasm—to the American temperance movement of the turn of the 20th century, in which crusades to abolish smoking (some successful) accompanied that of the more high-profile pursuit of alcohol prohibition. Adolf Hitler ostensibly labeled tobacco “the wrath of the Red Man against the White Man”, recalling how early settlers of the Americas foisted intoxicating liquors upon a genetically unprepared indigenous population. Anti-tobacco sentiment was embraced by the Nazi party. Few, if any, of these initiatives flourished to achieve widespread, long-term enforcement; successive governments repealed all of them.

Even though the US was long the cradle of the global tobacco market, it has also largely set the standards for the contemporary wave of anti-smoking legislation. Though several jurisdictions passed laws in the 1970s restricting smoking in restaurants to separate sections, the City of San Luis Obispo, California, first implemented a ban in all public places, including restaurants and bars—the first in the nation, and, purportedly, the world. What began as sundry municipal ordinances in the early 1990s expanded to a statewide anti-smoking campaign in 1995, which saw the first workplace smoking ban. Opposition from the tobacco industry pushed the ban’s effect on bars and nightclubs until January 1, 1998. Other states followed with their own bans (at varying levels of severity), to the point that, as of 2010, only 11 states have not enacted a ban—and the majority of these states still allow municipalities to create their own laws prohibiting smoking. Other countries have followed suit, and some—with a less decentralized system of governance than the US—have enacted California-style indoor smoking bans for restaurants, bars, and pubs across the entire national boundaries in a single fiat. Meanwhile, San Louis Obispo recently escalated its own smoking ban to include restrictions on city parking garages and lots, streets, sidewalks, stadia, playgrounds, and parks. The City isn’t quite the pioneer this time around; over twenty other cities in California preceded it in banning smoking in these new locations.

However, one institution has proven doggedly immune to this sweeping attack on the culture of cigarettes: casinos. Several states’ laws have stalled in the legislature because of appeals from the gaming lobby. Nine states that passed widespread smoking bans years ago have exempted casinos. Other states have exempted the hospitality industry altogether, while regulating most other workplaces. Even states with otherwise generally uncontested bans, such as New Jersey, have allowed smoking to continue in the robust gaming parlors of Atlantic City: after the Council passed a ban in 2008, it quickly rescinded it due to the casinos’ pressure, allowing smoking to remain on 25% of the floors. Other states that have not exempted casinos from the smoking bans have witnessed an impact: the Illinois Casino Gaming Association has experienced an over 30% drop in revenues from February 2007 to the same point in 2009, while comparable casinos in Northwest Indiana have only experienced single-digit declines amidst a punishing economy. Although hardly the only factor influencing Illinois casinos (the regulatory climate for gaming in the state is much stricter overall), casino operators easily predicted that plunge in revenues; many of them estimate that 70% of casino patrons smoke.

Regardless of the viability of those estimates, a quick trip to a casino not affected by anti-smoking legislation suggests that they milk what survives of the smoking culture for all it’s worth. Mississippi, for example, has no statewide ban (though over 20 municipalities in the state ban smoking in all workplaces). Casinos are not subject to any laws outside of municipal bans, and no city in the state with casinos would ever dare regulate them, for fear of driving them out of town. The smoke-friendliness of a Mississippi casino hotel is manifest within moments of walking through its doors: aside form the ashtrays at nearly every slot machine or poker table, smokers can criss-cross the parking garages, hallways and the main lobby without repercussions, cigarette in hand. Most casino hotels offer a bounty of smoker-friendly overnight accommodations, and even the elevators—where smoking is banned virtually everywhere else in the United States—apparently permit smoking.

But nothing shows smoker friendliness like a public restroom.

The men’s room at this Mississippi casino (to be left anonymous) even allows the more coordinated gentleman to have a smoke while taking a leak. Notice the ashtray to the upper left of the urinal.

And just in case he isn’t so great puffing and pissing simultaneously, it has a grooved spot to store the cigarette.

I particularly like the fact that the casino restroom accommodates the youthful or more vertically challenged smoker as well.

But my favorite element of all: the toilets let the men smoke during number two as well.


I’m not sure this ashtray acknowledges multitasking talent or a remarkable defiance of basic hygiene. Although it has become increasingly common knowledge that men wash after restroom use far less than women, thus perhaps explaining why men may be less fazed by putting a cigarette to their lips while nature is calling than women would, something tells me that this casino accommodates female smokers in their respective restroom as well. At this casino, even an institution like Starbucks remains remarkably tolerant of smoking.

Though the sign still proves that they prohibit smoking in the store’s premises within this casino, the establishment is completely open to the adjoining lobby where people may smoke freely. In fact, I have witnessed in another casino that people can stand one inch outside the premises or scoot a café chair to the hallway, while letting the smoke waft into the Starbucks. Virtually everywhere else in America, Starbucks has long been vehemently anti-smoking; they have increasingly started to impose smoking bans on their outdoor patios. Starbucks' regulatory rights do not extend into the hallways of a casino, but the java giant would hate to sacrifice its ability to supply caffeine to late-night denizens of the already notoriously windowless casinos. A huge number of Mississippi casinos have Starbucks in them.

Even as casinos are proving to be one of the biggest indoor environments that advocate for their right to accommodate smokers, more and more are falling prey to the bans. Iowa’s governor Chet Culver has recently considered expanding the state’s ban so that casinos are no longer exempt, and the Atlantic City moratorium on the casino smoking ban still falls under increased consideration. But if the gaming industry can continue to argue that its success depends on remaining a bastion for smokers, it is unlikely that too many more states will impose bans while the economy remains weak and casinos provide abundant jobs. Their infrastructure's subtlest details support smoking.

At the beginning of this essay, I compared this casino initiative to an earlier blog post in which another sweeping policy—that of heightened national security in airports—manifests itself with increasingly restrictive results, just as is the case in the relation between smoking bans and gaming. The similarities stop there though. The Transportation Security Administration and all of its rigorous screening standards have arisen, almost cumulatively, as a direct response to the terrorist attacks on September 11. Airport security was relatively unobtrusive prior to this event, which provoked a spike in regulating how people could board airplanes. Though some could argue that the intensity of smoking bans has spiked as well within the past five years, no single discernible cataclysm spawned it. It has arisen gradually over decades and with widely varying results across jurisdictions, while the federal government has implemented airport security standards with great uniformity. These striking differences may explain why one of the two initiatives has elicited far more chatter of controversy. While privacy advocates have objected to the intrusiveness of screening technology and airlines have said that the hassle detracts patrons from flying, the implementation of airport security has hardly divided the nation enough to arouse “breakaway” airport authorities; that would be illegal. By and large the public has voluntarily ceded this responsibility to the federal government. Conversely, smoking bans remain profoundly fragmented spatially and have suffered rejections in a number of municipalities where leaders have attempted them; the likelihood of the United States seeing a national ban akin to Ireland seems faint. In fact, by some metrics, it’s too late—Ireland passed the ban in 2004 as a national policy. Despite one of the most aggressively anti-smoking cultures in the world, the American public would never tolerate such a top-down approach for smoking, even as top-down was largely accepted as the ideal solution for airport security.

No doubt I’m engaging in some pretty vicious rhetorical gymnastics to analogize these two phenomena, but perhaps the crucial way of viewing them through the same lens involves their relation to the mundane. Even for the most frequent of fliers, air travel deviates from normal rhythms far more than, say, using the restroom. It is generally easier to shift public opinion in non-routine matters than those experienced by everyone. Smoking may hardly be a universally shared experience, but to the habitual smoker, it is as much a part of the day as a trip to the toilet when you get out of bed. I’m not trying to be an apologist for smoking/gaming nor a critic, but removing ashtrays from casinos has clearly generated more flak than installing body scanners in airports. Now only these questions remain: how did the public react when smoking was banned from flights, or what would happen if airports introduced gaming, as is the case in smoker-friendly Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam?