This Old Neighborhood: Fixing Suburbia

Kickoff Briefing: The Nagog Hill Exercise

Welcome to This Old Neighborhood

And a particular welcome to all of you who’ve joined up at the outset of this adventure.

My name is Miles Fidelman.  I'm the Chief Engineer for This Old Neighborhood, and Supervising Engineer for The Nagog Hill Exercise, our first project in redeveloping a suburban neighborhood.

As we go along, I'll be sharing our experience, in the hope of providing some entertainment value, and that some of you might learn something you can put to use in your own communities.

I'll be posting my Engineer's Log, as we go along - a mix of written posts, briefings like this one, audio podcasts & slideshows from site walks, live & recorded video from interviews & working sessions, reports & other documents, and who knows what else.

As we move forward, we'll be holding public events - both online & on the ground - community workshops, site visits to examine promising technologies & construction techniques, vendor expos & bidders’ conferences, design competitions - all the things that go along with a large project, that involves lots of players. An exercise in tilting at windmills & herding cats - things I've gotten somewhat good at over the years, and for some reason seem to enjoy - a good thing in that I seem to be stuck with the job.

Today, I bring you a Kickoff Briefing, in TED-talk-like form. I'll be providing a situation assessment, the lay of the land, our game plan, a preview of coming attractions, and some opportunities to get up close and personal as we move forward.

Welcome to This Old Neighborhood.

Situation Assessment: A Journey into Uncharted Waters

I come to you today, from the Village of Nagog Woods, a 50-year old condominium complex, the oldest in Massachusetts, where I thought I was settling in for a comfortable retirement.

Instead, I find myself serving on one of our four condo boards, and our long-range capital planning committee - as we struggle to reinvest our capital reserves to update our aging buildings, grounds, and infrastructure, without breaking the bank, or suffering a catastrophic meltdown of the sort befalling so many other communities around us.

We’re Big: 277 units, 38 buildings, a clubhouse, pool, tennis center, a contracted management company, and a sewage plant we share with our neighbors. Water comes from the town; gas, electric, telephone & cable from private utilities. We have our own zip code & school bus stops. We border a reservoir, town forest, art museum, and a regional park. We’re essentially a self-contained street & utility district. 

And We’re Old (or at least Middle Aged): Decades of deferred maintenance, and patchwork repairs are catching up with us, as they are with many suburban subdivisions built in the past century. It’s time for our 100,000 mile major maintenance.

We find ourselves in largely uncharted waters: 

• The magic of the marketplace isn't bringing us solutions. Nobody is knocking on our door with a comprehensive renovation package. Our mandated Capital Reserve Study - which we paid good money for - tells us nothing more than how much to set aside for maintenance (a maintenance reserve study that tells us nothing more than to expect continually increasing costs, as our systems continue to age).

• Government isn't helping. Local legislation requires that we decarbonize our energy systems - but our town government isn’t providing any guidance, or assistance. The Financial Times reports: The $9tn question: how to pay for the green transition. The bill for meeting climate goals will be immense. Governments worldwide are trying to figure out how to foot it.

It falls to us to solve our own problems, and to finance the solutions ourselves. We must find ways to work together to rebuild our neighborhood, and to find a way that we can afford. A way to reinvest our capital reserves in improvements that pay for themselves - rather than continuing to throw money at higher & higher repair bills.

And that's why we’re here today.

We Have the Power to Rebuild Our Neighborhoods

We have the technology, the know how, the construction techniques, and the money. We have the capability to rebuild our neighborhoods.  Better, stronger, cleaner, greener, more sustainable & maintainable, more affordable.

What we DON’T have are maps to follow. Building a new subdivision is a solved problem: Developers can simply run the numbers, using cookie-cutter design templates, project plans, and financing packages. Renovation is another story: We’re just reaching the point where we need to solve the problem. We’re in uncharted territory. Somebody has to go first, blaze a trail, draw a map for others to follow.

I find myself stuck with the problem.

The Problem is Organizational, and Financial: We Need to Get Our Act Together!

Some places have figured it out.  The Netherlands has been keeping itself above water for centuries, now they're going green. One of these days, my wife & I hope to retire to a houseboat on an Amsterdam canal.

New York City, my birthplace, has been rebuilding itself continually, with a mantra of Dig We Must for a Better New York. 9/11 was just a blip on the radar, another urban redevelopment project - NY completed repairs on lower Manhattan about the same time as putting the finishing touches on a new aquaduct & subway spur.

Boston gave itself a 400-year overhaul and makeover. The Big Dig wasn't about depressing a highway, it was about ripping up 400 years of old wires & pipes - replacing copper cables with fiber optics, cast iron pipes with PVC. (And yes, depressing some ugly highways, and building parks over them.)

College campuses, office parks, neighborhoods of single family houses - some are doing it better than others, but folks have a handle on maintaining and updating their infrastructure.

Subdivisions, full of multi-family homes, run by condo and homeowners associations, are less fortunate. And the problem is that nobody is really in charge. Here at Nagog, we have 277 unit owners, 4 condo boards, separate boards for our community corporation and sewage plant, a management company, private utilities, and our surrounding town governments - all working at cross purposes: Nobody has the big picture, and nobody is really in charge.

We’re all in business together - partners in a real estate venture. We operate as our own local government, and public works department - but we really don’t think, or operate as such. We suffer from years of deferred maintenance & patchwork repairs - driven by a demand for low condo fees, a bias towards small projects that avoid triggering build to code requirements, government by multiple volunteer committees, and unit owners who prefer the stance nobody can tell me what to do with my unit to finding ways to work together for mutual benefit. Most of all, we need an attitude adjustment - a sense of being in this together.

We contemplate replacing our building envelopes, while individual unit owners install their own windows, doors, sliders, insulation, HVAC & hot water heaters. Our sewage treatment plant is busily relining the mains, but that stops at the street - from there, depending on which length of pipe we’re talking about, it might be a condominium association problem, or an individual unit owner’s - every time a pipe clogs, or breaks, it’s an exercise in finger pointing over who’s responsible for repairs, who pays to clean up the mess, and it’s well nigh impossible to contemplate re-plumbing a building-at-a-time). We have to start thinking big picture & systemically. Not just within our subdivision, but with our neighbors - with whom we share common infrastructure.

We've a reached a point where the condition of our buildings, grounds, and utility infrastructure require comprehensive measures - building envelope replacement, a new drainage system, updating the wires & pipes in our walls. We MUST go big, and the only to way to afford it, is to work together. But, even if we want to work together, there's no clear way to do so - who floats a loan, who issues an RFP, who manages a contract? It's a challenge.

And An Opportunity

At Nagog Woods, we find ourselves in the interesting position of having to go big, and operating in a town that just passed a decarbonization ordinance - one of 10 Massachusetts pilot communities that now require all new construction, and major reconstruction to be fossil fuel free. Not only do we have to go big, we have to update our systems to new technology. And, we have the experience of doing so - we previously purchased our sewage treatment plant from its private owners, updated everything, and are now busily relining our sewer mains using ARA (American Rescue Plan Act) funding. We know how to operate, renovate, and finance utility infrastructure that serves not just us, but many of our neighboring residences & businesses. Now we must expand our vision, to encompass the entirety of our buildings, grounds, and common facilities.

New technologies, construction techniques, and financing models are being demonstrated all around us - notably neighborhood-level geothermal heating & cooling - far more appropriate for multi-family buildings, than individual, unit-by-unit heat pumps. If we can organize to renovate a building, and a block, at a time.

We can learn from these efforts, as we look for ways to organize & finance the major work that we need. Government incentives may be available if we move quickly.

We are well positioned to rebuild our neighborhood - not just our Village, but our neighbors as well… IF and ONLY IF we can find ways to think at neighborhood scale, and work together, rather than at cross purposes.

Some say it’s impossible, tilting at windmills. I say it’s more like herding cats - something I’ve been doing for most of my career

How We Fix Suburbia

To me, this is familiar territory. I spent my career building large networks & systems - military command & control networks, enterprise systems, large pieces of the early Internet; helping the military stage field exercises; updating dispatch systems for big city bus fleets - working mostly at the early planning & organizing stages.

For about 6 years, I helped cities & towns develop infrastructure plans, manage utility construction under their streets, and launch municipal telecommunications networks.  I wrote the book on it.

I lived through, and under Boston's Big Dig - with a backstage pass to much of the engineering & politics - as a major city gave itself a 400 year overhaul and makeover.  At the same time, I found myself deleading, and gut-rehabbing a city brownstone.

To me, the way forward is clear & simple, if a bit political & painful. And, I could use a new challenge.

The Internet Approach to Community Development: Build a Network, Start Talking to Each Other

I’m following a model that I experienced personally, living through the growth of the Internet from its earliest beginnings - much of that time on the inside, building large pieces of it.

In 1961, at 7 years old, I attended John Kennedy's inauguration - face plastered to the window of my uncle's office on Pennsylvania Avenue, as Kennedy’s car drove by. The next year, Kennedy gave his famous Moon Speech, proclaiming, We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

A year later, JCR Licklider, the first head of ARPA/IPTO, wrote a (paper) MEMORANDUM FOR: Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network - launching what became the loose collection of Working Groups that comprise the Internet Engineering Task Force - which brought the Internet into existence, largely through voluntary participation in standards development, voluntary adoption of standards by industry, and demand pull from its users. Then and now, the Internet is run by what looks very much like a global town meeting, comprised of a myriad of committees, communicating largely over email lists. (For history buffs, Sam Adams launched the United States, the same way - calling a Town Meeting, which formed a Committee of Correspondence, which wrote the Boston Pamphlet, and distributed it to Town Meetings across Massachusetts. They, in turn, formed their own Committees of Correspondence, started exchanging correspondence with each other, as well as forming militias, and sending representatives to constitutional assemblies. Here in Acton, our Minuteman Company was formed with a sign-up sheet, circulated at Town Meeting - and those men became the first over the bridge, and the first to die, in Concord.) In 1968, Licklider & Taylor wrote, In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face - a year before the ARPANET went live.

In 1969, Apollo 11 arrived on the Moon, the ARPANET passed its first packets, we saw Woodstock, and the birth of Monty Python - all, seminal influences. Two years later, I arrived at MIT, just before Ray Tomlinson sent the first ARPANET email, enshrining the “@” sign in the history of technology. Over the course of 4 years, I had a front row seat to the birth of virtual work teams & academic communities, linked by email lists & file servers. Ten years later, I found myself at BBN, builders of the ARPANET, developing network management systems & procedures for its extension into the military world - as the ARPANET begat the network-of-networks that we now call the Internet. And, a few years after that, I had the great privilege of working with Ray - I was managing a software product, Ray was one of our developers. The greatest, and humblest, Software Engineer I’ve ever met.

In 1992, the Internet opened to the public, people started calling for electronic democracy and electronic town halls - which, to me, sounded a lot like the self-governance process that brought us the Internet - which has now grown into the global nervous system of humanity - still (un)governed by the same loose process. I launched The Center for Civic Networking, to conduct experiments in community planning, through civic networking, which I defined as interacting with others regarding civil affairs; using computer or other electronic networks to interact regarding civil affairs. We ran a number of pilot projects, launched several Community Networks. And then, in 1996, the Telecommunications Act was passed - exposing cities & towns to the risk of uncontrolled street construction by telcos and cable companies, as well as creating the opportunity to build their own municipal broadband networks. I launched our Municipal Telecommunications Strategies Program, started collecting case studies, started publishing a Journal of Municipal Telecommunications Strategies, wrote a book on Telecommunications Strategies for Local Governments, and went on the speaking circuit giving workshops, and consulting to municipal officials. I spent about 6 years immersed in infrastructure master planning, managing construction in & under public rights-of-way (streets, utility poles, etc.), and helping communities launch municipal broadband networks - largely an exercise in public relations & politics, bringing enough people to the point where they would approve a bond, allowing a city manager or utility director to start hiring construction engineers & contractors. Essentially the process I’m following here, on Nagog Hill.

The steps are simple:

1. Walk the site, talk to people, gather stories, needs, desires, ideas, plans, … .

2. Bring people together, to share stories, and come to agreement that something needs to be done.

3. Form a working group - of citizens, business people, public officials - to start planning for funding, and going out on bid.

4. Engage in a lot of public relations work to promote the concept - taking things to the point where a city council can pass a bond issue, and a utility director can issue an RFP (Request for Proposals), leading to hiring construction engineers & equipment vendors, to design & build a network. (At which point, I’d move on to the next project.)

Basically: Bring People Together, Start Some Conversations - the rest takes care of itself.

Network We Must for Better Neighborhoods

Over the next month or so, I will be expanding this Engineer’s Log, into the beginnings of a new generation of Community Network - as a vehicle for bringing our community closer together, and supporting meaningful conversation, leading to shovel-ready projects that we can fund and move forward with.

For a community to work together, it needs a vehicle - be it Town Meeting, a Community Association, a Community Development Corporation, clandestine meetings in taverns, or discussions across back fences. For a while, local newspapers played a key role; later supplemented by new generation of Community Media: Cable access channels, FreeNets, and grass roots community networks.

The Internet continues to be run by email. Businesses have largely reorganized around enterprise networks. Professional communities congregate around blogs and wikis. But, unfortunately, while we’ve built a hive of minds for the rest of us - calling it social-media - we use it primarily to shout at each other, dividing & polarizing ourselves (call it anti-social media, complete with Monsters from our Collective Id).

Just as we are seeing a new wave of local newspapers emerge, it’s now time for a new generation of community and civic networks. Conveniently, I’ve managed to retain the domain Civic.Net - which I am beginning to use as an umbrella for weaving together a Civic Internet - a network of local community networks, and particularly, local Civic Working Groups. The Internet model, applied to Community Development. This Old Neighborhood, and the Nagog Hill Exercise are starting points. By sharing our activities online, with a broader audience, I hope that some of you will form working groups & community networks, in your own neighborhoods – and collaborate with us towards the larger goal of Fixing Our World, while there’s still time.

I’ll be posting this Engineer’s Log as we go along - as an ongoing record of our activities & progress - and a town crier or public address system, providing announcements of upcoming activity. It will take the form of a mixed stream of written posts, briefings like this one, audio podcasts & slideshows from site walks, live & recorded video from interviews & working sessions, reports & other documents, and whatever else comes along.

In short order, I will be opening a video channel - essentially a neighborhood hangout, or break room, back fence, or water cooler - pick your analogy. As the opportunity arises, we will netcast music, presentations, conversations, and events of various sorts - both ad hoc, and scheduled. This will be our lever for bringing together both ad hoc & scheduled meetups & birds-of-a-feather groups, bull sessions, story hours, open mic nights, TED-like talks, design presentations & review sessions … the list goes on. And, for organizing real-world happy hours, block parties, porch fests, food truck rodeos, story hours, TED-like talks, and other community-building events.

We will provide for you, our viewers, to gather into your own, small-group, watch parties, study groups, special interest groups, working groups, in your own communities - with your own email lists, chat groups, and video breakout rooms. (Contact me directly, if you’d like to set something up for your group - be it simply a private channel, or a kick-off workshop to help you get started).

Starting Some Conversations

To move things along, we’ll be organizing public events - both online & on the ground - community workshops, site visits to examine promising technologies & construction techniques, vendor expos & bidders’ conferences, design competitions - all the things that go along with a large project, involving lots of players.

This week, and next, I’ll be launching three specific streams of conversation:

• An Academic Conversation, focused on How we Organize & Finance Subdivision-Scale Renovation. I’ll be following the model of my previous Journal of Municipal Telecommunications Strategies - collecting & discussing case studies, organizing academic workshops & conferences, publishing the results as handbooks, offering workshops. I am fortunate to again be joined by Jerry Mechling, former Budget Director for the City of Boston, one time Director of the Kennedy School’s program on Strategic Computing in the Public Sector, one time Member of my Editorial Board for the Journal Of Municipal Telecommunications Strategies. Jerry also co-hosted a conference with me, at the Kennedy School, on the impacts of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 on local government - which pretty much launched the Municipal Telecommunications Strategies Program (thank you Jerry). This time around, we’ll be looking for Models for Organizing, Financing, and Procuring Subdivision-Level Renovation Projects - examining projects in related areas, looking for ways to apply them to our situation at Nagog Woods, and more generally to the world of communities governed by Condominium & Homeowners Associations.

• A Business & Industry Conversation: I will be going on the road (playing Anthony Bourdain) to interview neighboring businesses, visit project sites (particularly in the 10-town-pilot communities), and talk with vendors offering new technologies & construction techniques. We will be publishing a stream of curated news stories, interviews, TED-like talks, vendor capabilities briefings, project proposals, … . We will be assembling a permanent online catalog/gallery/showcase/exposition - with an eye toward organizing road shows, pop-up displays, and trade shows (we look toward the Interop shows that helped launch the Internet beyond the academic world). And we will be working to build both a Nagog Hill Business Network, and a Community of Practice focused on Neighborhood-Scale Engineering & Redevelopment.

• A series of Community Conversations: I will be interviewing fellow owners, board members, and staff, here in the Village of Nagog Woods, and in our neighboring communities - digging deep into people’s stories, concerns, visions, aspirations, and plans for the future of our community. I will be organizing online & in-person conversations, where we may further develop ideas into projects, plans, working groups, organizations, contract vehicles, and ultimately projects that we can finance & put out to bid.

A Preview of Coming Attractions

We will be ramping up with a conversation with Jerry Mechling - to kick off our academic inquiries into the big-picture, policy, and financing issues. We will be following up with conversations with real estate brokers & lawyers - to dig deep into the issues they’re seeing, up-close-and-personal, in the communities they work with (e.g., rising condo fees, the spectre of special assessments, dysfunctional organizing documents & organizations, … the litany of horror stories that need to be addressed).

I will also begin a series of interviews with organizations that are working with multiple communities on energy projects, watershed protection, small farm development, local economic development and other major trends - to better understand the forces that are shaping the world around us – and to start identifying options that are available, affordable, and attractive - seeds for productive conversations that might lead to viable projects.

In parallel, I will be beginning a series of conversations with fellow owners, and neighbors on Nagog Hill - collecting stories, concerns, and most important, visions & aspirations for how we would like to be living, current plans for maintenance & improvements, starting the process of bringing us to a point where serious collaboration becomes possible, and feasible.

Watch This Space

Subscribe to my Engineer's Log, for ongoing progress reports & announcements of upcoming activities & events.

If you’d like to speak up & participate, a paid subscription is cheap, and supports our work. If you have questions you’d like us to address, comments, suggestions, projects that you’d like to show off - please comment on this post.

Watch for our forthcoming Conversation with Jerry Mechling on the Big Picture Issues Facing our Communities and a start on looking at How we Organize & Finance for Subdivision-Scale Renovation. We will be opening the conversation to paid subscribers, for Q&A and discussion, and build on it to engage with additional members of the financial and real estate law community - working toward case studies, academic studies & conferences, and ultimately standard form contracts, financing vehicles, and project planning tools for Suburban Redevelopment.

Until Next Time, Good Night, and Good Luck!

Miles Fidelman, Chief Engineer