AMERICA - Service in the City

"The Self-Service City" by Timothy Egan, New York Times

First, they took away the cops parked at key intersections and replaced them with with mounted, overhead cameras. This idea didn’t start in my city, Seattle, but when it turned out to be a revenue-generator, even if it reduced safety, City Hall took to it with a vengeance.

Who needs a human being when you can write ten times as many tickets without overtime pay?

Then, they made us do detailed sorting of our garbage – not just paper and plastic, but all the melon rinds and apple cores favored by compost worms. Fine.

They asked us to put rain barrels under our gutters to collect runoff. Done.

Next up was a plan to force people to haul out their trash from certain city parks. These may be public spaces – the city’s shared living rooms – but the message was clear: you’re on your own.

I get it. And so do my neighbors. This spring, while planting tomatoes and squash in the terraced garden behind my house, I noticed the hillside was full of fellow urban horticulturists ripping up ornamentals to push the edges of their farmlets.

One neighbor who had never looked twice at a blackberry bush put in raised beds stuffed with enough vegetable starts to run a produce stand.

Another said he was going to raise chickens. “You can get about a dozen eggs a week,” he said, detailing his plans to build a predator-resistant coop for a preening, pecking, egg-laying flock of flightless birds.

We discussed the merits of owning a pygmy goat. Seattle is one of a handful of cities where a homeowner can now keep this hoofed mastication machine. The pygmies produce milk and make great pets, not to mention what they can do to a hillside of twigs, bramble and invasive vines.

We are an overwhelmingly urban nation, especially the West – the most urbanized region of the country, according to the Census Bureau definition.

But the will to till has never left us. At the same time, this recession is forcing local governments to abandon traditional services. Cities are becoming robotized and retro at the same time.

The last century saw the flowering of the City Beautiful movement – grand boulevards and parks, Parisian in intent, if not actual design.

This century, hit with the worst economic slap since the Great Depression, has brought the self-service city – shrunken, less personal and meaner on one level, more neighborly on another.

In the hardest-hit cities, where big clusters of foreclosed houses sit empty, entire blocks are being returned to nature – land banks, they call them.

About 4 million homes are now abandoned, 3 percent of the nation’s housing stock. In Buffalo, nearly 10,000 houses sit empty. In parts of Flint, Mich., and Columbus, Ohio, every third home is without an inhabitant.

“Demolition means progress,” proclaim signs in Flint.

But it’s not just the old Rust Belt. Half-drained swimming pools of ghost houses in the far exurbs of Southern California bake in the summer sun.

Las Vegas, where the helium of unfettered growth produced a housing boom unmatched in this country, is followed closely by Detroit as the city that has been quickest to empty out, Forbes magazine found.

There is opportunity in this crisis, as more than one mayor has proclaimed, paraphrasing Rahm Emanuel. City dwellers: this land is your land!

So, we have cities doing by default what urban planners could never do. Greener cities, yes. More open spaces in what were once ruined neighborhoods. Healthier, perhaps, even with the pall of economic desperation. Part of an ecosystem, housing units no longer defined exclusively by city lots and housing walls.

But at the same time, cities are turning impersonal – with eye-on-the-people enforcement. In this respect, the self-service city has no heart, no room for mercy. It’s like umpiring a baseball game by remote camera. We might as well install self-ticketing devices in our cars.

Numerous studies have found that robo-cams make intersections less safe. People panic knowing the camera is on them, trying to beat the recording click of their license plate. In Alexandria, Va., one study found that accidents increased 43 percent at intersections where cameras were used to enforce red lights.

But the self-service city can’t resist the temptation of all that increased revenue.

There is something cynical, and certainly calculating in a bottom-line way, about city governments that ask all of us to be more involved with one another, our garbage, our plot of dirt, our newly demolished, formerly blighted communities, and then turn a cold eye to us.

My city has just joined others in unleashing software-and-camera laden vehicles that will prowl the streets, taking pictures of license plates and tire position to catch those who dare try to get another 15 minutes out of a parking meter. This is City Hall without a face. Lovely Rita, Meter Maid – I miss you.

In 10 years’ time, maybe less, it will be hard to recognize the self-service city. It happened, we will say, largely without design or unified intent. No master plan was put forth. It evolved as we slept.