The Path of the Warriors- A tribute to Fallen Heros.

Transit Induced Gentrification

Efforts to build housing around transit threaten to price out those most dependent on bus and rail

A San Diego Metropolitan Transit System trolley stops at the corner of Park Boulevard and Market Street in the East Village, where expensive apartment buildings and condominiums stand in stark contrast to the neighborhood's economically challenged residents. (Howard Lipin / San Diego Union-Tribune)
Joshua Emerson SmithContact Reporter



On his way to a doctor’s appointment, Steve Schneider sits at a bus stop in North Park on Tuesday afternoon surrounded by trendy coffee shops, tattoo parlors and mustachioed hipsters sipping craft beer.

The 68-year-old has lived in the neighborhood for 25 years, but in just the last four, he’s seen his rent jumped from $850 to $1,275. As an epileptic on a fixed income, he cannot drive and has recently started to fear he may have to move and lose access to transit.

“I get anxious about it, especially last year when my rent went up, and I thought ‘What am I going to do?’” he said. “That’s when I decided to get rid of my cell phone and go on the food stamps.”

Schneider’s situation could be part of an emerging new trend of bus and rail riders priced out of their communities by the very policies designed to boost transit ridership.


Lawmakers, academics and urban planners from Southern California to Sacramento have long called for building denser housing around transit stops. The idea is to design neighborhoods that encourage people to ditch their car commutes — simultaneously fighting climate change while trying to address the state’s historic housing crisis.

However, efforts to inspire construction along rail and bus lines, coupled with a severe shortage of housing, have brought opulent apartment buildings and condominiums into economically challenged neighborhoods. As young professionals flock to the new housing, moderate- to low-income tenants in urban areas from San Diego to Sacramento are now facing displacement.


Tenants’ rights groups, especially in Southern California, say the trend is already playing out in many communities with serious consequences.The greatest risk is the places that are already showing signs of gentrification. There’s already value in those neighborhoods and the private market has seen.— Miriam Zuk, director of the Urban Displacement Project at UC Berkeley


“You’re seeing families pushed further from transit,” said Laura Raymond, campaign director for Alliance for Community Transit in Los Angeles. “Around the urban core, we still have a lot of low-income families living next to transit-rich areas. They don’t have cars. When those areas are gentrifying, they’re moving out, and it becomes a lot more difficult to access their jobs.”

In the last five years, there were about 400 multifamily buildings completed or under construction within a half mile of a transit stop in the metropolitan areas of San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento and the Bay Area, according to data from real estate tracker CoStar.

While the median family income in those neighborhoods was on average less than $64,000 a year, the average cost of a two-bedroom apartment was more than $3,500 a month, according to a San Diego Union-Tribune analysis of Census and Costar data.

And about one in five of those projects are in areas where the median household income is less than $30,000, where the average rent on a two-bedroom apartment is still more than $3,300.

Concerns have become so pronounced, in fact, that academics have given the phenomenon a name: “transit-induced gentrification.”

“Being within a half mile of a rail station, we did see higher rates of gentrification in those neighborhoods,” said Miriam Zuk, director of the Urban Displacement Project at UC Berkeley, who has studied the phenomenon.

“The greatest risk is the places that are already showing signs of gentrification,” she added. “There’s already value in those neighborhoods and the private market has seen that.”

Zuk participated in a report prepared last year for the California Air Resources Board by UC Berkeley and UCLA that tracked demographic shifts around rail transportation in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

The report found that “transit proximity has a significant impact on the stability of the surrounding neighborhood, leading to increases in housing costs that change the composition of the area, including the loss of low-income households.”

A San Diego Metropolitan Transit System bus travels along Market Street at 13th Street near the 13th and Market apartments in East Village, where rent for a two-bedroom apartment is more than 2,800 a month. (Howard Lipin / San Diego Union-Tribune)

Will building more housing solve the problem?

While the idea that rising housing costs are overhauling the face of many neighborhoods around the state and country, what to do about it, especially in transit-rich areas, has become a hot-button issue in California.

Experts agree that the state’s skyrocketing rents and home prices are largely the result of a massive housing deficit.

In the last decade, the state has added an average of roughly 80,000 new homes annually, far short of the roughly 180,000 needed every year to keep pace with growth, according to a recent report from the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

However, to actually lower the cost of housing, the state would need to add roughly 2.5 million new units by 2025, or roughly 357,000 a year, according to a recent analysis from the University of Southern California.

Perhaps not surprisingly, nobody seems quicker to point out the need for a massive infusion of new workforce housing than the construction industry.

“You can demand transit-oriented development all day long, but it’s not going to house the people that need housing in those areas,” said Borre Winckel, president and CEO of the Building Industry Association of San Diego County. “I’ve never seen this much demand for the middle market. There’s no parallel in history. This is very scary, uncharted territory, and people are not taking this seriously.”

Coalitions of upwardly mobile professionals have formed in just the last year or so to demand lawmakers from city hall to Sacramento embrace policies to inspire new-home construction. These groups have embraced the notion that just dramatically increasing housing supply will bring down the price of homeownership as well as renting across all income levels.

Most notably the newly formed nonprofit California YIMBY — which stands for “yes in my backyard,” a play on the commonly used acronym NIMBY or “not in my backyard” — sponsored a bill in the state Legislature this year that would have bulldozed zoning requirements for density and parking up to a half mile from major transit stops all around the state.

Many academics supported the move enthusiastically.

“What’s really contributing to gentrification is the lack of new housing being built in general regardless of location,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley School of Law. “If you don’t build new homes for these newcomers, they’re going to buy up existing homes and start gentrifying neighborhoods.”

However, a recent effort by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, to loosen zoning regulations and encourage more construction around transit ran into opposition, from homeowners to local elected officials to even tenants’ rights organizations.


Affluent communities have routinely expressed concerns about new housing bringing increased traffic and undermining local aesthetics. More recently, lower-income renters have started demanding policies to prevent renters from being shunted aside in the rush to build housing for middle-class families.

After garnering national attention, Wiener saw his proposal, SB 827, to preempt local zoning rules around transit abruptly killed in its first committee hearing.

The death blow came, somewhat surprisingly, with opposition from rights groups for low-income tenants, such as Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, known as SAJE.

“My group really believe strongly in increased density along transit lines,” said Executive Director Cynthia Strathmann. “We just want to make sure that a big component of that is affordable.”

While Wiener and California YIMBY readily included a number of amendments at the behest of the fair-housing groups, it wasn’t enough to win their support. Backers of the bill are expected to renew their efforts and attempt to build a broader coalition next year.

Transit riders such Richard Krukowski aren’t holding their breath. The 51-year-old survives on disability payments and lives in a studio apartment in San Diego’s rapidly gentrifying East Village. He said he’s looking for a cheaper place to live on the bus line, but hasn’t had much luck.

“Clearly everybody’s concerned,” he said of all his friends in the area, “but pretty much everyone knows how it’s going to go. You’re not going to beat the developers and the big bucks.”

Can government policies ensure affordable housing for all?

Campaigns to bring down the cost of housing are threatening to pit the middle-class residents against the renters.

Right now, a developer who includes affordable housing in a project can get bonuses through the state and local government. Incentives include everything from faster permitting to being able to construct more units within a single building to relaxed parking requirements.

However, many advocates would like to see lawmakers take a more heavy-handed approach, requiring projects around transit stops to include a designated number of affordable units, using what are known as inclusionary zoning ordinances.

Such policies can be effective but they’re not without their consequences, said Casey Dawkins, a researcher with the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland.

“What tends to happen is you get affordable lower-income housing and you get more expensive unrestricted housing, and it’s harder to fill the middle and achieve moderate income affordability,” he said.

Some neighborhoods would like to see such zoning restrictions aimed at middle-income residents as well.

Under pressure from local residents, the city of San Diego has repeatedly stalled on plans to allow for greater density around planned transit stations that will serve the Mid-Coast Trolley extension, which is under construction from downtown to University City. Such proposals have routinely drawn huge crowds of angry homeowners from Bay Park, Linda Vista and Clairemont.

Recently, however, neighborhood residents have shifted from outright opposition to higher-density development to ensuring that whatever gets built is affordable for working-class people in the immediate area.

“What the community wants is workforce housing, and what the proposals are on the table from the land owners are luxury rentals with ocean views,” said James LaMattery, spokesperson for a group called Raise the Balloon, formed to oppose a city proposal to raise the building height limit in Bay Ho from 30 feet to 60 feet. “The city wants to rezone for more housing but they don’t want to guarantee the appropriate housing.”

LaMattery and others have suggested that developers who build workforce housing should get a break on inclusionary fees, which subsidized housing for the poor.

Therein lies the rub: In the decade or more it could take to erase California’s housing backlog, government policies aimed at controlling costs may result in winners and losers split along economic lines.

“Let’s be frank, there’s sometimes a blindness from the YIMBY crowd about the interests of the low-income tenant community and communities of color,” said Colin Parent, executive director of Circulate San Diego and member of a new local Democratic Party club YIMBY Democrats. “It just doesn’t occur to them that these displacement issues are big problems.”

In the meantime, efforts to enact rent controls are popping up around the state. For example, in National City — where 70 percent of the population are tenants — a signature drive is underway to cap annual rent increases at 5 percent in the city.

Statewide, tenants’ rights advocates have spearheaded a repeal of a decades-old law known as the Costa Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which prohibits cities from imposing rent control on single-family homes, condominiums, as well as any apartment buildings built after 1995.

Supporters are closing in on the 550,000 signatures they need to qualify a measure for the November ballot.

Landlords and developers strongly oppose lifting the restrictions, saying that rent control will only exacerbate the housing crisis. Experts and even progressive economists have agreed.

“It will absolutely interfere with new construction, and that’s the biggest fear we have,” said Debra Carlton, senior vice president of public affairs for the California Apartment Association. “If you can’t make that thing pencil it’s not going to happen in cities with strict rent control. It’s a great way to slow development.”

Carlton added that developers and even large corporate landlords aren’t making huge profits off the current situation.

“Despite what people might think the margins are very slim, because of the cost of land,” she said. “Even those high-end towers have staff costs, attorney costs, not to mention what it cost to buy and build it.”

Will affluent residents ever embrace public transit?

The overwhelming majority of transit riders are people of limited means.

In San Diego, for example, 84 percent of transit riders come from households that make less than $60,000 a year, according to data from the San Diego Association of Governments. And roughly 80 percent of riders are dependent on transit as their primary means of transportation.

A study in January from the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies found that ridership of public transportation in Southern California had dipped as car ownership, especially among lower-income residents, increased.

After working her full-time job at a local coffee house in North Park, Wendy Islas drives with her husband to their home in Mexico, where they moved to save on rent. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune)

Wendy Islas, for example, moved with her husband to Rosarito in January to avoid the rising cost of rent in her La Mesa neighborhood. For her it made more sense to trade a bus commute to the North Park job where she works for a more than hour-long drive by car.


“We’re trying to save money to buy a house, but if we kept living in San Diego it would be impossible,” said the 30-year-old San Diego native. “It’s tough right now because we have to wake up at the crack of dawn.”

An improving economy and cheap gas likely fueled the trend in falling transit ridership. But even as prices at the pump rise, some fear displacement of transit’s core patrons will continue to exacerbate challenges for systems around the state.

Even some of transit-oriented development’s biggest supporters have recognized the irony of the situation.

“The real story is those people that move into the high-density areas take Uber and Lyft not buses,” said architect-developer Jonathan Segal. “That’s the irony.”

Segal is no stranger to the changing dynamics of urban neighborhoods. He has built several critically lauded projects in North Park and Little Italy focused on invigorating street life.

He said that while newly arrived residents in these area may not be taking transit, he’s not giving up on his vision, which he believes still encourages people to drive less.

“Because it’s in a dense corridor, all the amenities come with that, like bars, coffee shops, the drycleaners,” Segal said. “So you don’t have to drive to Fashion Valley to see a movie.”

He might be right.

Findings from the Urban Displacement Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA have found no correlation between displacing transit riders and higher rates of overall driving in a region.

According to the report there is “little evidence that (vehicle miles traveled) would be affected by displacement unless it is accompanied by a loss of population near transit.”

The study found that lower-income residents drive less than more affluent households regardless of how close they are to transit, while higher-income residents tend to use their cars more infrequently the closer they are to a rail station.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that those residents are commuting to work using bus or rail systems.

Transit-rich San Francisco is the exception, with slightly more people biking, walking and taking transit to work than driving, according to Census data. But in San Diego County, for example, 85 percent of workers 16 years and older still drive to their job.

YIMBY Urbanists can learn from Gardeners. "Overcrowding Kills Growth"

Poor Garden Spacing, Overcrowding,
Failure to Thin

This one is my pet peeve about beginning gardeners, because garden spacing mistakes are costly and completely avoidable. Overcrowding ALWAYS leads to an unnecessary crash course in pest control and disease management.

Spinach and Lettuce Interplanted with Chiles © Steve Masley…Click IMAGE to Enlarge

Beginning gardeners have enough on their plate without this.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen starter pots of 20 or 30 basil seedlings just stuck in the ground without separating the seedlings and spreading them out.

It’s easy to understand how this happens. People are afraid to damage delicate seedlings, so they just plunk the whole pot in the ground.

Then there’s the reverse problem, the temptation to fill in all that bare, empty expanse of prepared soil with plants. Seeds and seedlings look so tiny in all that black space, but you have to imagine them as they’ll be at full size, and space them accordingly.

Click Any Image to See a Larger Version

Top 10 Mistakes
1.) Too Much Garden
2.) Wrong Varieties
3.) Planting Too Early
4.) Poor Soil Preparation
5.) Poor Garden Spacing
6.) Not Enough Light
7.) Incorrect Watering
8.) "More is Better" Trap
9.) Not Mulching
10.) Ignoring Pollinators

“I paid for 6 zucchini plants, I may as well plant them.”

“I planted seeds and got so many carrot seedlings, I just don’t have the heart to thin them.”

Such are the rationalizations that get newbies into trouble. Plants in overcrowded plantings are undernourished, stressed by crowding, produce a fraction of their potential yield, and are more susceptible to pests and diseases than properly spaced plants.

If you just get Garden Spacing right, you can save yourself a huge amount of frustration and wasted effort later in the season.

La La Land Full Soundtrack with lyrics.

Apartments coming to a neighborhood near you in Marinwood/ Lucas Valley/Terra Linda

Editor's Note: The fight for sensible land use is being fought in Seattle too. Like Marin, zealous planners, politicians and housing advocates are rezoning neighborhoods for affordable housing, micro apartments and the conversion of single family neighborhoods into multifamily apartment blocks. This is the idea behind the Priority Development Area in Marinwood and the rest of the 101 corridor. This is the future of Marinwood if they get their way and pass SB-1. It will allow redevelopment ANYWHERE without a declaration of blight.

The Fight Against Small Apartments

Why Neighborhood Groups Are Uniting to Stop Developers from Building Tiny, Affordable Units

by DOMINIC HOLDEN

KELLY O

In May of 2009, a rumor was floating around City Hall. Homeowners on Capitol Hill were furious about a construction project. So one sunny afternoon, while workers hammered nails into a few unfinished buildings near 23rd Avenue and East John Street, I went knocking on doors to find out what the problem was.

One neighbor was Alan Gossett. Gossett was trying to sell his blue Craftsman house, which shared an alley with the new development. Standing on the corner of his rear deck, Gossett pointed through the trees to the half-built structure and said, "I think this is going to be a magnet for very sketchy people."

Why sketchy?

According to permitting paperwork, the building was a commonplace cluster of six town houses—the sort that would typically attract well-to-do buyers. But inside each town house, the developer was building up to eight tiny units (about 150 to 250 square feet each, roughly the size of a carport) to be rented out separately. The tenants would each have a private bathroom and kitchenette, with a sink and microwave, but they would share one full kitchen for every eight residents. The rent would be cheap—starting at $500 a month, including all utilities and Wi-Fi—making this essentially affordable housing in the heart of the city. And, remarkably, for affordable housing, it was built without any subsidies from the city's housing levy. But Gossett was bracing for 46 low-income renters in the space where he'd been expecting six new homeowners instead.

Gossett and other neighbors felt hoodwinked, they told me.

There was no public notification and no review process that allowed neighbors to pose objections. This was due to a loophole in the permits: The city and developers classified the building as six units (with up to eight bedrooms each), instead of as an apartment building with dozens of units, which would have required a more public process. Neighbors said they feared that the area wasn't ready for so many new residents and that the influx of newcomers would usurp on-street parking. But Gossett also seemed concerned by who his new neighbors might be.

"Anyone who can scrape up enough money to live month-to-month can live there," he said, worried that low-income interlopers would jeopardize his chances to sell his own house. "I don't think most people want to live next to a boarding house with itinerant people living in it."

Police are spying on cellphone data

Gene Hackman in the movie "The Conversation"

New Hi-Tech Police Surveillance: The “StingRay” Cell Phone Spying Device

Blocked by a Supreme Court decision from using GPS tracking devices without a warrant, federal investigators and other law enforcement agencies are turning to a new, more powerful and more threatening technology in their bid to spy more freely on those they suspect of drug crimes. That’s leading civil libertarians, electronic privacy advocates, and even some federal judges to raise the alarm about a new surveillance technology whose use has yet to be taken up definitively by the federal courts.

StingRay cell phone spying device (US Patent  photo)

The new surveillance technology is the StingRay (also marketed as Triggerfish, IMSI Catcher, Cell-site Simulator or Digital Analyzer), a sophisticated, portable spy device able to track cell phone signals inside vehicles, homes and insulated buildings. StingRay trackers act as fake cell towers, allowing police investigators to pinpoint location of a targeted wireless mobile by sucking up phone data such as text messages, emails and cell-site information.

When a suspect makes a phone call, the StingRay tricks the cell into sending its signal back to the police, thus preventing the signal from traveling back to the suspect’s wireless carrier. But not only does StingRay track the targeted cell phone, it also extracts data off potentially thousands of other cell phone users in the area.

Although manufactured by a Germany and Britain-based firm, the StingRay devices are sold in the US by the Harris Corporation, an international telecommunications equipment company. It gets between $60,000 and $175,000 for each Stingray it sells to US law enforcement agencies.

[While the US courts are only beginning to grapple with StingRay, the high tech cat-and-mouse game between cops and criminals continues afoot. Foreign hackers reportedly sell an underground IMSI tracker to counter the Stingray to anyone who asks for $1000. And in December 2011, noted German security expert Karsten Nohl released "Catcher Catcher,"powerful software that monitors a network's traffic to seek out the StingRay in use.]

Originally intended for terrorism investigations, the feds and local law enforcement agencies are now using the James Bond-type surveillance to track cell phones in drug war cases across the nation without a warrant. Federal officials say that is fine — responding to aFreedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and the First Amendment Coalition, the Justice Department argued that no warrant was needed to use StingRay technology.

“If a device is not capturing the contents of a particular dialogue call, the device does not require a warrant, but only a court order under the Pen Register Statute showing the material obtained is relevant to an ongoing investigation,” the department wrote.

The FBI claims that it is adhering to lawful standards in using StingRay. “The bureau advises field officers to work closely with the US Attorney’s Office in their districts to comply with legal requirements,” FBI spokesman Chris Allen told the Washington Post last week, but the agency has refused to fully disclose whether or not its agents obtain probable cause warrants to track phones using the controversial device.

And the federal government’s response to the EFF’s FOIA about Stingray wasn’t exactly responsive. While the FOIA request generated over 20,000 records related to StingRay, the Justice Department released only a pair of court orders and a handful of heavily redacted documents that didn’t explain when and how the technology was used.

The LA Weekly reported in January that the StingRay “intended to fight terrorism was used in far more routine Los Angeles Police criminal investigations,” apparently without the courts’ knowledge that it probes the lives of non-suspects living in the same neighborhood with a suspect.

Critics say the technology wrongfully invades technology and that its uncontrolled use by law enforcement raised constitutional questions. “It is the biggest threat to cell phone privacy you don’t know about,” EFF said in a statement.

ACLU privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian told a Yale Law School Location Tracking and Biometrics Conference panel last month that “the government uses the device either when a target is routinely and quickly changing phones to thwart a wiretap or when police don’t have sufficient cause for a warrant.”

“The government is hiding information about new surveillance technology not only from the public, but even from the courts,” ACLU staff attorney Linda Lye wrote in a legal brief in the first pending federal StingRay case (see below). “By keeping courts in the dark about new technologies, the government is essentially seeking to write its own search warrants, and that’s not how the Constitution works.”

Lye further expressed concern over the StingRay’s ability to interfere with cell phone signals in violation of Federal Communication Act. “We haven’t seen documents suggesting the LAPD or any other agency have sought or obtained FCC authorization,” she wrote.

StingRay pricing chart (publicintelligence.net)

“If the government shows up in your neighborhood, essentially every phone is going to check in with the government,” said the ACLU’s Soghoian. “The government is sending signals through people’s walls and clothes and capturing information about innocent people. That’s not much different than using invasive technology to search every house on a block,” Soghoian said during interviews with reporters covering the StingRay story.

Advocates also raised alarms over another troubling issue: Using the StingRay allows investigators to bypass the routine process of obtaining fee-based location data from cell service providers like Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Comcast. Unlike buying location data fro service providers, using StingRay leaves no paper trail for defense attorneys.

Crack defense attorney Stephen Leckar who scored a victory in a landmark Supreme Court decision over the feds’ warrantless use of a GPS tracker in US v. Jones, a cocaine trafficking case where the government tracked Jones’ vehicle for weeks without a warrant, also has concerns.

“Anytime the government refuses to disclose the ambit of its investigatory device, one has to wonder, what’s really happening,” he told the Chronicle. ”If without a warrant the feds use this sophisticated device for entry into people’s homes, accessing private information, they may run afoul of a concurring opinion by Justice Alito, who ruled in US v Jones whether people would view unwarranted monitoring of their home or property as Constitutionally repugnant.”

Leckar cited Supreme Court precedent in Katz v. US (privacy) and US v. Kyllo (thermal imaging), where the Supreme Court prohibited searches conducted by police from outside the home to obtain information behind closed doors. Similar legal thinking marked February’s Supreme Court decision in a case where it prohibited the warrantless use of drug dogs to sniff a residence, Florida v. Jardines.

The EFF FOIA lawsuit shed light on how the US government sold StingRay devices to state and local law enforcement agencies for use specifically in drug cases. The Los Angeles and Fort Worth police departments have publicly acknowledged buying the devices, and records show that they are using them for drug investigations.

“Out of 155 cell phone investigations conducted by LAPD between June and September 2012, none of these cases involved terrorism, but primarily involved drugs and other felonies,” said Peter Scheer, director of the First Amendment Center.

The StingRay technology is so new and so powerful that it not only raises Fourth Amendment concerns, it also raises questions about whether police and federal agents are withholding information about it from judges to win approval to monitor suspects without meeting the probable cause standard required by the Fourth. At least one federal judge thinks they are. Magistrate Judge Brian Owsley of the Southern District of Texas in Corpus Christi told the Yale conference federal prosecutors are using clever techniques to fool judges into allowing use of StingRay. They will draft surveillance requests to appear as Pen Register applications, which don’t need to meet the probable cause standards.

“After receiving a second StingRay request,” Owsley told the panel, “I emailed every magistrate judge in the country telling them about the device. And hardly anyone understood them.”

In a earlier decision related to a Cell-site Simulator, Judge Owsley denied a DEA request to obtain data information to identify where the cell phone belonging to a drug trafficker was located. DEA wanted to use the suspect’s E911 emergency tracking system that is operated by the wireless carrier. E911 trackers reads signals sent to satellites from a cell phone’s GPS chip or by triangulation of radio transmitted signal. Owsley told the panel that federal agents and US attorneys often apply for a court order to show that any information obtained with a StingRay falls under the Stored Communication Act and the Pen Register statute.

DEA later petitioned Judge Owsley to issue an order allowing the agent to track a known drug dealer with the StingRay. DEA emphasized to Owsley how urgently they needed approval because the dealer had repeatedly changed cell phones while they spied on him. Owsley flatly denied the request, indicating the StingRay was not covered under federal statute and that DEA and prosecutors had failed to disclose what they expected to obtain through the use of the stored data inside the drug dealer’s phone, protected by the Fourth Amendment.

“There was no affidavit attached to demonstrate probable cause as required by law under rule 41 of federal criminal procedures,” Owsley pointed out. The swiping of data off wireless phones is “cell tower dumps on steroids,” Owsley concluded.

But judges in other districts have ruled favorably for the government. A federal magistrate judge in Houston approved DEA request for cell tower data without probable cause. More recently, New York Southern District Federal Magistrate Judge Gabriel Gorenstein approved warrantless cell-site data.

“The government did not install the tracking device — and the cell user chose to carry the phone that permitted transmission of its information to a carrier,” Gorenstein held in thatopinion. “Therefore no warrant is needed.”

In a related case, US District Court Judge Liam O’Grady of the Northern District of Virginia ruled that the government could obtain data from Twitter accounts of three Wikileakers without a warrant. Because they had turned over their IP addresses when they opened their Twitter accounts, they had no expectation of privacy, he ruled.

“Petitioners knew or should have known that their IP information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy,” Judge O’Grady wrote.

A federal judge in Arizona is now set to render a decision in the nation’s first StingRay case. After a hearing last week, the court in US v. Rigmaiden is expected to issue a ruling that could set privacy limits on how law enforcement uses the new technology. Just as the issue of GPS tracking technology eventually ended up before the Supreme Court, this latest iteration of the ongoing balancing act between enabling law enforcement to do its job and protecting the privacy and Fourth Amendment rights of citizens could well be headed there, too.

Other good articles on cellphone surveillance:

See related Huffington Post article HERE

An amazing surveillance technique of data dumping using fake cellphone towers to intercept wireless communications.  See this USA Today Article HERE

Letter to Marin IJ "Marinwood Fire needs to merge with other agency"

Marinwood Fire needs to merge with other agency

Marinwood Fire Department should be merged with another agency, period. We pay way too much for too little fire service. Each month our Marinwood firefighters are responding to emergency calls in San Rafael, and Marinwood taxpayers are footing the bill. We are essentially a substation for San Rafael but get paid nothing in return for 50 to 66 percent of all emergency service calls.

It gets worse. In 2011 Marinwood passed Measure E, which was supposed to give us a paramedic from San Rafael Fire Department to be stationed in Marinwood. Due to labor issues this has never happened and we have been paying the tax for seven years. Marinwood CSD has done nothing to address this rip-off on behalf of Marinwood taxpayers

A better solution for all parties, most especially the firefighters themselves, is to merge Marinwood Fire with a larger agency or convert to a semi-volunteer department. A merger with San Rafael would create better career opportunities for firefighters; San Rafael will have more resources to deploy and Marinwood could concentrate its limited resources to parks, open space and recreation.

Why not contract our fire service just like we do with county sheriff for policing services? The new agency can stay in our fire station and keep the same staff. Just change the lettering on the fire truck and hardly anyone will notice the difference.

— Stephen Nestel, Marinwood

A Plague on Cities, and the PoorBrutalism’s enduring influence

A Plague on Cities, and the PoorBrutalism’s enduring influence

Catesby LeighSpring 2018
Cities


The 24-story Grenfell Tower in London, where a voracious fire that started in a fourth-floor refrigerator took 71 lives in June 2017, was what the British call a tower block, anchoring a housing project with three low-rise “finger blocks” extending from it in a grassy, fenced-in compound. Topped off in 1974, toward the end of a massive postwar housing-construction campaign, the original tower was a Brutalist concrete hulk with the familiar sterile, diagrammatic array of horizontal window strips. The tower recently had been given a shiny new exterior cladding that converted it into a high-rise firetrap.

Now awaiting demolition, Grenfell’s scorched cadaver is a grim reminder that legions of Britain’s modernist housing projects turned out to be newfangled slums that hardly improved on the old row-house slums demonized by planners and architects. Tower blocks and high-rise slabs—the slabs often inspired by Le Corbusier’s quintessentially Brutalist Unité d’habitation (1952) in Marseilles, an exotic rectangular structure raised on bulky stilts, or pilotis—proved particularly inhospitable to their lower-income inhabitants. These buildings’ ill-conceived designs and often shoddy construction facilitated everything from vermin and black mold infestations to rampant criminality. Many of the 4,500 government-subsidized tower blocks erected by 1979 have been demolished.

Ironically, the Grenfell fire occurred amid a wave of Brutalist nostalgia among British “creatives”—a parallel universe of artists, architects, graphic designers, art historians, and critics, along with the developers, PR types, and upwardly mobile professionals keeping their company—and on the heels of numerous book-length paeans to Brutalist buildings in Britain and elsewhere. With titles including This Brutal World, Concrete Concept, Raw Concrete, and Concretopia, these British productions serve as reminders that the Brutalist sensibility, epitomized by the histrionic structures that Le Corbusier erected during the 1950s and 1960s in béton brut—“raw,” rough-textured, exposed concrete—never died.

The most exhaustive and wide-ranging of the recent books is Elain Harwood’s Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945–1975, published in 2015. The very heft of Harwood’s ponderously oversize (measuring ten by 11½ inches), 703-page tome reflects the eagerness of elite institutions to bankroll the historical vindication of cultural dysfunction. Her magnum opus was published by Yale in association with Historic England, the governmental consultant on preservation that employs her, for the university’s Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. Sumptuously illustrated with James O. Davies’s color photographs, Space, Hope and Brutalism runs the gamut of building types, from courthouses to gas stations. Many of the buildings that Harwood covers are glassy, boxy structures that are modernist but not Brutalist; she presumably included “Brutalism” in her title to generate more buzz.

The book is prodigiously researched. Harwood’s introduction to her chapter on churches, providing historical background on British religious life before and during the period she covers, is magisterial. Her architectural commentary, by and large, is not.

World War II left Britain in urgent need of rebuilding. The Blitz destroyed 200,000 homes and left another quarter-million uninhabitable. In the severely overcrowded urban slums, often blighted by industrial pollution, families lived without indoor plumbing, and they shared outdoor privies with neighbors. Others found shelter in temporary prefabricated homes produced by the aviation industry. In 1946, the government legislated the creation of new towns that, along with extensions of existing ones, would eventually be home to more than 2 million Britons. Aside from the new towns, a multitude of urban renewal and greenfield-development schemes emerged during the economically vigorous 1950s and 1960s. Housing “estates” erected by city and other local councils, mainly for lower-income residents, sprang up at a vertiginous rate, along with new office buildings, civic centers, shopping centers, parking garages, schools, hospitals, factories, and university buildings. Some 1.5 million prewar homes were demolished in the three decades following the war. Old urban centers were transformed: “Post-war Birmingham rebuilt itself in austere raw concrete, like Kuwait and Hanover and Manila,” Christopher Beanland enthuses in Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings Around the World. But by the late 1960s, it was obvious that most Englishmen weren’t keen on the idea of Birmingham looking like Kuwait and Hanover and Manila.

In her quest to redeem England’s generally dismal postwar architectural output, which she deems “as valuable as any in our heritage,” Harwood obscures as much as she reveals. What she has given us is less a history of postwar English architecture than of postwar English modernism’s greatest architectural hits, with major disasters conveniently excluded or glossed over, if not miscast as achievements.

The first indication that Harwood is on the wrong track comes in her preface, where she refers to the “hopes engendered by Clement Attlee’s Labour governments of 1945–51”—hence the “hope” in the title, which itself plays off the title of Sigfried Giedion’s hoary modernist gospel, Space, Time and Architecture, first published in 1941. The inevitable profession of faith ensues: “The values of the Welfare State [as envisioned by Attlee and his cohorts] formed me and I grew up believing that they would last forever. This book explores the framework of that belief as expressed in the architecture” of the postwar decades. Harwood is telling us that she does not regard architecture as an autonomous art, to be appraised on its own terms. It can be justified, to a significant degree, by good intentions—as a by-product of a progressive political ideology.

This fallacy underscores the unpleasant reality that in England, as in the United States, the poor routinely served as guinea pigs in welfare-state housing schemes that were part and parcel of what Norman Mailer denounced half a century ago as a “totalitarian architecture [that] destroys the past,” leaving its victims “isolated in the empty landscapes of psychosis.” Those with the least say in determining where they would live found themselves relegated to habitats that served not only to isolate but also to stigmatize them. Harwood fails to give this reality due emphasis, which is odd, considering that of the three pillars of the postwar British welfare state—nationalized medical care, expanded educational opportunity, and council housing—only the last crumbled. A couple of decades after Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 electoral victory, its share of the national stock had shrunk from more than one-third to one-eighth.

Harwood acknowledges an important phase of critical reappraisal as postwar architectural adventurousness, along with socialist “hopes,” withered under “the cold light of Thatcherism”—but her survey suggests that Britain’s cultural elite has consigned that reappraisal to oblivion. She barely mentions Prince Charles, though his 1988 BBC documentary, A Vision of Britain, along with the superbly illustrated book version published the following year, represented a frontal attack on postwar modernism, offering a traditional take on architecture and urbanism that resonated with the public. The prince’s vision has since been fleshed out in a superb new community, Poundbury, that he commissioned outside the city of Dorchester. Poundbury offers a compelling alternative paradigm to Brutalist dystopias and the commoditized suburban subdivisions that developers started plopping down in the 1930s.

Like many Brutalist projects, Mondial House—a mutant eight-story ziggurat clad in bright white plastic on the Thames’s north (ARCHAEO IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)



Many of the buildings that Harwood’s book covers make you wonder whether it is really about architecture at all. Consider Park Hill (1961), a huge council-housing estate containing nearly 1,000 duplexes and single-level flats that partially replaced a demolished slum overlooking downtown Sheffield—a crime-ridden precinct that, for all its problems, had housed a resilient community. Laid out as four long, interconnected slabs inflected so as to form an utterly antiurban, vermiculated footprint, Park Hill owed an enormous debt to the Unité d’habitation. At every third story, it featured elevated open-air “streets” or “decks”—the Corbusian fetish of the day—that ran indoors and out, connecting the slabs. As at the Unité, the imagery was nakedly industrial, with the apartments stashed in a “bottle-rack” grid of concrete that soon assumed a depressingly drab tincture and also proved prone to spalling. A ruthless rationalism likewise asserted itself in the level height maintained throughout the complex, which ranged from four to 13 stories, despite the irregular, sloping site. Park Hill was less a work of architecture than a huge, strange contraption inflicted on the urban skyline. Visual amenity, such as it was, came in the form of soft-hued brick within the concrete grid.

As with many postwar housing projects, Park Hill offered practical amenities that residents had never before enjoyed: indoor plumbing, hot water, mechanical heating, even a sophisticated garbage-disposal system. Harwood mentions that, Britain’s many council-housing catastrophes notwithstanding, Park Hill “stood firm.” This is not true. By 1979, less than 20 years after its completion, Park Hill was an urban basket case—riddled with graffiti, terrorized by hooligans, afflicted with irruptions of black mold and the terrible stench resulting from waste-disposal blockages. Deserted decks and stairways provided criminals with multiple escape routes.

An even larger housing complex situated farther up the hill, Hyde Park, degenerated much more quickly. Completed in 1965, Hyde Park was designed along the same lines as Park Hill—though its gargantuan, long-since-demolished 18-story slab, Block B, presented an even more forbidding sight. Hyde Park, which Harwood mentions only in passing, immediately became known as a problem estate. In 1979, it had its day of infamy when a television set tossed off a balcony fatally struck an eight-year-old girl.

Local journalist Peter Tuffrey’s Sheffield Flats, Park Hill and Hyde Park: Hope, Eyesore, Heritage—whose title might seem to play ironically off Harwood’s but for the fact that the book appeared two years earlier—allows us to study a map and old photographs of the slum that Park Hill and Hyde Park supplanted. What we see are blocks, courts, and alleys teeming with row houses and low-rise tenements—streetscapes displaying a human scale, much solid construction, and considerable dereliction, all to be swept away by the desolation of the Corbusian superblocks.

Harwood doesn’t trouble herself with the Hulme Crescents (1972), another assemblage of concrete slabs on the vermiculated, “streets-in-the-sky” plan that rose from the blank slate of a demolished Manchester working-class district where 90,000 people once lived—“the human engine-room of the Industrial Revolution,” as Lynsey Hanley calls it in her largely autobiographical and often engrossing Estates: An Intimate History. The Crescents, designed to house more than 13,000, were conceived in emulation of Bath, the gorgeous Georgian city. Things didn’t work out that way.

“Almost immediately, the estate’s infrastructure began to suffer from the same problems that beset Park Hill and Broadwater Farm [a troubled north London estate]: leaky roof membranes, infestations of vermin and insects, uncontrollable damp, deserted walkways, and an endemic feeling of isolation,” Hanley notes. “The flats were so expensive to warm that many tenants never turned the central heating on, and communal areas were so difficult to maintain that the [city] council could not cope. When a small child died after falling off the top-floor ‘access deck’ of one of the Crescents in 1974, families decamped to the outskirts, belatedly following the rest of old Hulme.” The Crescents’ descent into chaos did make it possible for an anarchic punk scene to flourish in an upper-level hangout known as The Kitchen. The party ended with the estate’s demolition during the 1990s.

The Lancaster West Estate anchored by Grenfell Tower is a smaller-scale superblock. Its creation nevertheless entailed elimination of several streets. The result was a pocket of crime and deprivation in London’s now-gentrified North Kensington neighborhood. In debunking such schemes in her Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs highlighted the crucial importance of the traditional city street—tidy-minded modernists’ bête noire, due to its untidy juxtaposition of vehicular and pedestrian traffic—to the survival of civilized life in economically stressed neighborhoods like the old Park Hill or the North Kensington of half a century ago. One wonders just how often slum clearance of old row-house blocks, which might have been renovated to include modern conveniences—“mod cons,” as the Brits call them—was a wise idea.

Harwood doesn’t try to pin the widespread failure of low-income housing projects on Thatcherite cuts in maintenance and security budgets, the knee-jerk leftist explanation. She shows that postwar housing initiatives were being widely questioned a decade before Thatcher came to power. And she acknowledges that modernism never made a dent in the characteristic English aspiration to a house with a garden. People on their way up in life, especially if they were intent on raising families, were never likely to remain in high-rise council housing, no matter how well maintained.

Still, the folly of concentrating lower-income populations in tall buildings eludes her, just as it eluded the Tory government that, in 1956, introduced hugely generous subsidies for the construction of high-rises, relative to row houses and semidetached houses. Not only are tall buildings much more expensive to build and maintain than houses; they were not even essential to achieving the residential densities that postwar planners sought. Tall buildings are highly artificial and complex structures housing temperamental machines, like elevators, that require a heightened degree of maintenance, often by highly paid technicians rather than handymen with toolboxes and stepladders, as Hanley observes. Tall buildings also require an elevated degree of social discipline, as well as security features like intercom systems, closed-circuit TV, and doormen or concierges. The tower blocks and high-rise slabs at the Barbican Estate, the carefully developed, elaborately landscaped, intensely picturesque Brutalist “bankers’ commune” in the City of London, have been very successful. The appropriate synecdoche for the Barbican’s low-end counterparts, however, might well be a broken-down elevator littered with trash, defaced by graffiti, and reeking of urine.

Park Hill surely fared better than Hyde Park for a time because it was a high-priority model project. “Community development officers” saw to it that old neighbors were relocated next to one another and helped them settle in. Twelve caretakers lived on-site and were on call around the clock. All very nice, all very expensive, and all thoroughly unfeasible on a large scale. Social breakdown at Park Hill and elsewhere involved original tenants being replaced by increasingly “antisocial” elements. Viable council-housing populations became harder to find in Britain as employment in factories and mines declined, a process that accelerated during the 1970s and 1980s.

Government funding cuts under Thatcher intensified the estates’ decline, as did rampant drug abuse—heroin and, later, crack cocaine. But the decisive blow to council housing was Thatcher’s popular Right-to-Buy program, launched in 1980. It allowed tenants to buy their homes at a steep discount and, in due course, lease or sell them to third parties. Councils were forbidden to use the proceeds to build new housing or even improve their existing stock. This led to a much larger role for nonprofit housing corporations, to which many councils transferred some or all of their estates—a process actively encouraged by Tony Blair’s Labour government after his election in 1997. In redeveloping ex-council estates, nonprofits have used the sale of homes on the open market to help subsidize “social” housing. (The policy sea change has not prevented a housing shortage that is particularly acute in southeast England, starting with London.)

A curious variation on this redevelopment theme is unfolding at Park Hill. The estate was landmarked—or “listed,” as they say in Britain—by the government in 1998. According to a British architecture critic, Harwood was instrumental in its designation. A poll taken by Sheffield’s daily newspaper, the Star, showed the public opposing the listing by a factor of seven to one. The city council, hopeful of attracting a buyer, felt otherwise. The city, however, wound up handing Park Hill over to a hipster redevelopment outfit, Urban Splash, for free. And for the complex to be economically viable, it had to be significantly altered, not submerged in the familiar preservationist formaldehyde. The first portion to be redeveloped has gotten some sparkle in the form of shiny aluminum metal panels tinted red, orange, and yellow, supplanting the old brick infill. Interior decks have been narrowed, and apartment windows now look out on them, an obviously necessary security feature that the original design lacked. More than that, key fobs are now needed to access the decks from the ground level. Plans for the remaining redevelopment, to be completed in 2021, include student housing and a $29 million artists’ colony featuring apartments and studios, research facilities, a gallery, shop, and café, and a sculpture garden. Originally conceived as a city on a hill for working-class Sheffielders, the new and improved Park Hill will be a predominantly market-rate safe space for creatives. It is not the only ex-council estate experiencing such a transformation.

In addition to architecture that reflects a socially progressive agenda, Harwood focuses on technologically progressive architecture, as if the two went hand in hand. She is intrigued not only by buildings that incorporate new materials but also by those that incorporate industrial processes of production, especially new prefabrication systems, or even the look of consumer products.

The reader is thus treated to endless references to new systems, techniques, and materials as well as their manufacturers: Bison, Chisarc, Freyssinet, Magnel-Blaton, Zeiss-Zywidag, Wallspan, WindowGrid, prestressing, post-tensioning, space frames, Vierendeel trusses, gunite, Galvatite, Vitrolite, Forticrete, CorTen, neoprene, glass-fiber-reinforced polyesters (i.e., plastics), and so on. Harwood includes all manner of space-age nomenclature, with rudimentary window transoms transformed in architect-speak into “photobolic screens.” The 70-acre Aylesbury Estate (1977) in the London borough of Southwark, one of the largest public-housing complexes in Europe, soon became a national byword for urban mayhem. But Harwood merely refers to it in connection with large-scale deployment of the 12M Jespersen prefabricated panel-construction system.

Of course, new materials could accentuate the “wow” factor in new buildings. Mondial House (1975), for example, was a mutant eight-story ziggurat clad in bright white plastic. Perched on a deeply shadowed podium at a high-profile London site on the Thames’s north bank, it was built by the post office as an attention-grabbing structure housing a major telephone exchange. “[I]t was likened to the adding machines and Polaroid cameras popular at the time,” Harwood writes. And, like that of Polaroids, its shelf life was limited. It was knocked down in 2006.

Experiment with prefab systems, on the other hand, was inevitable where crash programs of postwar baby-boom home and school construction were concerned. But new materials and systems have their sinister side, especially when official corner-cutting and incompetence come into play, as they all too often have in the annals of Britain’s council housing. All indications are that the Grenfell Tower fire, currently the subject of an official inquiry, is a historic case in point. The building’s original cladding consisted of prefab concrete panels, which contributed to its drab appearance and provided inadequate insulation. Not long before the fire, a cheap, colorful new cladding was grafted on, its main components bearing the usual space-age trade names—Celotex RS5000 and Reynobond PE. Insulation foam that emits a toxic combination of hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide fumes when it burns was attached to the original panels. A narrow ventilation cavity separated the foam from a thin “rainscreen” veneer, a panelized sandwich cladding with aluminum on each face and a polyethylene core. The cavity functioned as a chimney during the fire, but the rainscreen’s core as well as the insulation foam was flammable. The fire therefore swiftly engulfed the exterior of the building.

It’s not a new story. While “visionary” architects and planners were selling council officials on the idea of leveling down-at-the-heels neighborhoods to make way for the towers and slabs, developers sold them on cheap prefab building systems that required a minimum of skilled on-site labor, which was in short supply during the postwar decades. An epidemic of substandard construction ensued. The most notorious case, prior to Grenfell Tower, was Ronan Point in east London’s Canning Town. Here the Danish Larsen-Nielsen system of prefab, reinforced-concrete panels was employed half a century ago in the construction of eight towers, or “points”—including Ronan—over 20 stories high, though the system was not designed for buildings taller than six. Incredibly, though load-bearing, Ronan Point’s panels were connected to one another by nothing more than a few bolts, which promptly began to rust because joints weren’t even sealed. A kitchen gas explosion early one morning in May 1968 left Ronan, which had been completed only two months earlier, looking as if it had undergone a partial renovation by Frank Gehry, with a stack of living rooms collapsed on one another. Thanks to the early hour, the death toll was limited to four.

Elsewhere around London, the demolition of Euston Station and its magnificent gateway, Euston Arch, prompted an uproar similar to that caused by the destruction, also during the 1960s, of the original Pennsylvania Station in New York. Euston dated to the 1830s and 1840s. In addition to the arch, its majestic Great Hall had a civic status akin to that of the old Penn Station’s general waiting room. Harwood doesn’t mention the uproar, let alone the enduring unpopularity of the hopelessly banal new Euston Station that was completed in 1968. Meantime, large-scale redevelopment to accommodate offices, housing, and a shopping center at a historic south London crossroads, Elephant and Castle, was widely regarded as a failure, with the road-ringed shopping center a beached whale afflicted with poorly designed pedestrian access. Mandarin planner William Holford’s reconstruction of Paternoster Square next to St. Paul’s Cathedral was another architectural dud, done away with in a matter of decades.

Thankfully, proposed urban-renewal schemes came to naught at familiar London venues like Piccadilly Circus, Covent Garden, and, last but not least, Whitehall—where Cambridge architectural eminence Leslie Martin humbly proposed to demolish everything standing between the Palace of Westminster and Downing Street, including Gilbert Scott’s Home and Colonial Office and Norman Shaw’s Scotland Yard, to make way for a mini-Brasília. The sensibilities excited by such ill-conceived schemes were nakedly elitist—another crucial issue that Harwood acknowledges only in passing.

After Ronan Point, funds for urban redevelopment and ambitious council-housing projects became scarcer because of a worsening economic climate. Support within the political establishment was drying up, too. An active preservation movement had arisen in town and country to resist the rampant destruction of old buildings. Slum dwellers insisted that their neighborhoods be rehabilitated, not demolished. Modernist architects were increasingly seen as arrogant types bent on inflicting repellent structures with leaky flat roofs on their client-victims.

It wasn’t long before architectural historians and critics were writing books with titles like The Rape of Britain, while a popular 1970s novel portrayed a middle-class descent into savagery in a brash new London high-rise. Stanley Kubrick employed a system-built concrete housing development outside London, Thamesmead South, as an empty landscape of psychosis for A Clockwork Orange(1971), his cinematic version of Anthony Burgess’s novel about a violent gang of bowler-hatted thugs in a strange new Britain. More recently, widely publicized polls dubbed “Crap Towns” and “Demolition” have allowed the public to vent its resentment of the nation’s architectural disfigurement—epitomized, Hanley notes, by a rogues’ gallery including Park Hill; Birmingham’s Central Library (1973, demolished 2016), an upside-down concrete ziggurat that, in Prince Charles’s words, looked like “a place where books are incinerated, not kept”; Portsmouth’s Tricorn shopping center (1966, demolished 2004), a forbiddingly discombobulated Brutalist colossus; and a bizarre Cubist assemblage of concrete blocks, the open-air “Apollo Pavilion” (1969), bestowed on culturally hidebound miners in a County Durham new town who found themselves housed in badly built, flat-roofed cubes.

Now demolished, Birmingham’s Central Library looked, in Prince Charles’s words, like “a place where books are incinerated, not kept.” (JOHN JAMES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)



Harwood divines a link between waxing animus toward modernist architects and waning support for “the technocratic welfare state”—which, of course, was a bipartisan, Labour-Tory phenomenon, at least prior to Thatcher’s election as prime minister. But maybe people just got fed up with lousy buildings.

The term “Brutalism” is a bit tricky. While it typically refers to concrete buildings inspired more or less directly by Le Corbusier, a fad called New Brutalism was heralded in Britain by a boxy, un-Corbusian school building of 1953 in the seaside town of Hunstanton, Norfolk. It was modeled on a Mies van der Rohe building at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Hunstanton school’s exposed steel frame, exhibiting an exiguous modernist take on classical proportions, is configured as a grid of rectangles successively broken down into infilling panels of brick or glass. The school qualifies as an excellent example of what the late Henry Hope Reed would call anorexic architecture. But what is brutal about it? Well, its factory-like exposed structure and pipes and freestanding, industrial-looking water-tank tower might have seemed a tad brutal back in the 1950s, though they’re old hat by now.

Brutalism’s common denominator was that it wasn’t about aesthetics but authenticity. What is authenticity? Whatever the au courant modernist happens to think is the real deal. “Authenticity” is, in fact, the most important word in the modernist lexicon. Unfortunately for millions of postwar Britons, it is a fairly reliable antonym for “beauty” or “domesticity.” Its modern roots lie in the separation of authentic or genuine artworks from fakes. So far as architecture is concerned, however, the term is totally subjective. Brutalism’s pathologically materialistic criteria for authenticity include the use of industrial materials and emphatic exposure not only of a building’s structural system but also of functional innards such as stairwells, elevator cores, ductwork, and so on. Yet Brutalism’s “much-vaunted authenticity was itself a species of artifice,” as John Grindrod observes in Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain, “with schools, offices or houses ‘dressed up’ as factories, power stations or machines.” (Grindrod’s book—well researched, engagingly written, and generally misguided—is by far the best of the recent paeans to Brutalism.)

The Brutalist sensibility welcomed ugliness, of course: the more visually transgressive the structure, the more points for authenticity it was apt to score. England’s modernist buildings, however, have found a number of ways to be brutal. Skimpy construction has the rather brutal side effect of making the Hunstanton school “freezing in winter, boiling in summer,” as its caretaker informed Grindrod. There’s also the brutally depressing appearance of gray, dirt- and rain-streaked concrete buildings on those gray, wet British days, not to mention the brutal wind tunnels created by perching slabs on Corbusian pilotis, a practice that postwar architects pursued with neurotic insistence in Britain and elsewhere.

Incompetence can be brutal, too. Grenfell Tower and Ronan Point are reminders, and they’re not alone. In 1973, a fire at the Summerland leisure center on the Isle of Man took some 50 lives. Summerland, which had opened only two years before, was another Brutalist firetrap—clad in snazzy flammable materials including an acrylic plastic sheeting marketed as Oroglas. Then there was the 1960s residential complex built at the University of Surrey by a prominent modernist firm, the Building Design Partnership, which was “found too impersonal, attracting a high suicide rate,” as Harwood blithely informs us. It was replaced by buildings that actually looked like houses.

Modernism, as the British classicist Raymond Erith observed decades ago, defines itself in terms of what it is not—which is to say, not traditional—not in terms of what it is. It has accordingly pursued different avenues, some more worthwhile than others. Not all the modernist work in Space, Hope and Brutalismis bad. But the rate of aesthetic dysfunction in this book vastly exceeds that of an architectural culture worthy of the name. Nowhere does one encounter anything like a set of forms that would empower an architect to create a modernist equivalent of Bath, as the designers of the Crescents aspired to do. This is of no concern to creatives, who typically fail to see architecture as having anything to do with enduring forms. Not only are latter-day Brutalist enthusiasms in large measure a politicized, left-wing phenomenon, as architecture historian Barnabas Calder grants in his sometimes informative but more often overheated Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism; they are also sustained by a nihilistic post-punk emotivism typified by a hipster blog, F*** Yeah Brutalism—without the asterisks, needless to say. Hence the irony that perhaps the most visually engaging Brutalist complex in Britain, its trio of repellent high-rise towers notwithstanding, is that 40-acre “bankers’ commune,” the Barbican, erected between 1959 and 1982 on what was previously a Blitz-ravaged wasteland dotted with warehouses, an old church, and remnants of a Roman wall.

Perhaps the most visually engaging Brutalist complex in Britain is the Barbican, a 40-acre “bankers’ commune.” (Photo: F Fawcitt UK Photography/Alamy Stock Photo)



Though marginalized by Britain’s cultural elite, Erith and other traditional architects remained active in the postwar decades—despite the ongoing increase in the cost of labor and materials that was thought to necessitate modernist efficiencies such as industrialized building systems. This countercultural cohort gets some attention in Harwood’s book, but not enough. In terms of quality, if not quantity, traditional designers outshone their modernist counterparts in the categories of government buildings, academic buildings, churches, and council housing. Barriers confronting today’s classically oriented architects and urban designers include an elite culture that values “iconic” novelty and shock effect as ends in themselves, along with a financial culture geared to quick returns, rather than the “patient capital” required for the construction of humane as well as urbane buildings and neighborhoods that appreciate in value over the long term because they’re loved. Curiously, Britain’s big-name postwar architects have shown a pronounced tendency to reside in such traditional architectural settings, as if in defiance of the buildings they’ve inflicted on others.

Yet the mayhem continues. Like Manchester’s Toast Rack (1960), a vocational college building known for its concrete enfilade of parabolic arches, latter-day skyscrapers disfiguring London’s skyline, though exhibiting more glass, steel, and aluminum than concrete, have attracted their share of Brutalist monikers: the Gherkin, the Shard, the Walkie-Talkie, the Cheesegrater. It is a modernist commonplace that Brutalist architecture is going through the same phase of reevaluation that Victorian architecture did after a period of opprobrium. The eclectic, often picturesque architecture of the Victorian era, though, is part of the humanist tradition; it assumes its minor station within a historic continuum extending back in time for thousands of years. Brutalism summarily rejected that continuum, presuming to erect a radically dehumanized new architecture on the rubble of a demolished tradition. It had no interest in the visual logic of historic architectural idioms and no grasp of the functional and spatial logic of historic urbanism. For that reason, Brutalist nostalgia can only be regarded as a benighted, cult-like phenomenon. And any idea that a significant portion of the modernist buildings covered in Space, Hope and Brutalism warrants listing qualifies as a “mod con”—and not in the British sense of the term.

Catesby Leigh writes about public art and architecture and is a research fellow of the National Civic Art Society in Washington, D.C.