There’s a new film by Andrew Garrison from UT Austin. It looks great. Here’s some info from the site:

“Third Ward TX is a one-hour documentary about a group of artists finding inspiration in the remnants of a besieged black neighborhood’s storied past.

House by house, they worked alongside residents and local volunteers to craft a stunning new vision of what could be. In the process, these artists-turned-activists transformed lives - starting with their own. Third Ward TX is a revealing look at a community’s struggle to survive - from segregation to the limited promise of integration, from drug wars to the economic challenges of gentrification. It is a story of imagination and hope, passed along person to person.”

The film is in the SXSW film festival this year. Congrats to Andrew & his team!

That’s what Katherine Salant says in her latest column.

…most new houses today feature a capacious master suite that is often large enough to be characterized as a house within a house, or, as some wags have suggested, a McMansion within a McMansion. The master suite usually includes a sitting area for television viewing or computer work as well as the occasional fireplace and kitchenette. The kids are off in their own bedrooms, often with their own attached bathroom and their own television and computer. After dinner, the family scatters. In many households, a family dinner is a rare event.

In the piece she also quotes Stephanie Brown from U of Michigan, Peter Whybrow from UCLA, and Dan Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence.

There’s certainly something to this. I know in my own case there are many times - like, er, right now - that each person in the household is enganged in their own screen. Occassionally we send each other email or chat messages. Every rare once in a while we’ll yell across the empty living area from whatever room we happen to be in to the other person in another room on the other side of the empty living area.

A pair of graduate students at the University of Florida’s Documentary Institute have made a film about suburban lawns called Gimme Green.

This is from their Facts page:

• If present consumption patterns continue, two out of every three people on Earth will live in water-stressed conditions by the year 2025.
• On average, Americans use 40 to 60 percent of their water on their landscapes.

And its always been amazing to me how freely and without question we dose our lawns (and food and everything else) with synthetic chemicals we do not understand. The Gimme Green site mentions these stats:

• Of 30 commonly used lawn pesticides, 19 are linked with cancer
  or carcinogencity, 13 are linked with birth defects, 21 with
  reproductive effects, 26 with liver or kidney damage, 15 with
  neurotoxicity, and 11 with disruption of the endocrine (hormonal) system.
• Of those same 30 lawn pesticides, 17 are detected in groundwater,
  23 have the ability to leach into drinking water sources,
  24 are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms vital to our
  ecosystem, 11 are toxic to bees, and 16 are toxic to birds.

Makes you just want to lay out on the lawn and soak up the carcinogens, doesn’t it?

Tony Klein, an enterprising state representative from Vermont has proposed a McMansion Tax on homes over 4000 square feet. Home buyers would pay an additional $1000 for each additional 100 square feet over 4000 total square feet.

So a 5,000 square foot home will cost an extra $10,000.

Supporters say the goal is to promote energy efficiency and to send a signal discouraging big homes that need a lot of power.

Rep. Tony Klein: “When you build something that requires the potential use of a lot of electricity, even if you don’t use the electricity our utility has to have it in their portfolio which means they have to add to their contract amounts which means it costs all of us in our rates.”

Direct taxing (and this one is rather crude) may not be the way to do it, but there should be some public disincentive to living overly large. The private disincentives - like energy costs - do not really seem to deter anyone. Yet.

“McMansionization” is happening all over the country. I’ve been tracking it the past year or so and you see the same debates happening in town after town. Here’s a sample from Maryland.

‘‘[McMansions] can overwhelm those neighborhoods,” … Homeowners in Mount Rainier have torn down small houses and erected homes several times the original size. ‘‘Those homes can just dwarf everything else.”

Del. Joseline Pena-Melnyk (D-Dist. 21) of College Park said several neighborhoods in College Park — including Berwyn and College Park Woods — have seen their communities altered by McMansions.

‘‘You can imagine having a small house and suddenly having a huge house right next to you,” Pena-Melnyk said. ‘‘It can block the sun, and a lot of times it can be uncomfortable for residents.”

Giving local governments control over the building of large homes would also set rules and prevent conflict among neighbors unhappy with the development.

‘‘This will allow for some sense of order and … possibly prevent arguments among neighbors,” she said.

Last March, Bethesda’s Greenwich Forest Citizens Association publicly protested mansionization in their community.

College Park Councilman Robert Catlin (Dist. 2) said many McMansions being built in College Park are not owner-occupied, built primarily for student housing.

‘‘Sometimes, in addition to being a giant mass, [the design] is totally out of the character of the neighborhood,” he said.

Yes, and as I’ve said before, design affects community, and is central to it’s identity and health.

James Lee has penned a column in response to the KERA broadcast and notes the importance of churches and schools, and the fact that these topics were left out of the film. It’s a valid point, and not one that escaped my attention. The issue of churches and religion was left out of the film on purpose, along with a few other big topics like the role of media. I’m working on a post that talks about these matters. The bottom line on my view of the role of churches is that they can be connectors but, importantly, they can can also be dividers - it depends on the church and how politicized they are.

I especially appreciated this line:

I’ve traveled the world, and it has been my experience that, whether in neighborhoods or foreign countries, people generally get back what they radiate.

Absolutely. If everyone around you is cold, its very hard to be warm, and vice versa.

The Mercury has posted an article and interview conducted a few weeks back. The interview is probably of more interest to readers of this blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: What … effects does poor community planning have on Americans today?

A: When you have a loss of social capital - a lack of community - the problems are many. Basically if you don’t have community at a local level, you may not have democracy.

When you are isolated, statistical research has shown you are more unhealthy, you age faster, and you are two to five times more likely to die of all causes if you’re socially disconnected. Crime rates are known to be directly related to social connectedness. A lot of the things people think are crime problems, and they tend to try to solve them by creating more barriers, more walls, more fences, more isolation, more separation. That actually makes the problem worse, not better.

Q: What would you tell someone who tries to strengthen the connections within their subdivision communities?

A: Most people do want some kind of connection to others to varying degrees. There are some who will always want to be pretty isolated and shut in. It’s very hard to overcome neighborhood inertia and style. The style of neighborhood I was in before was basically cold. To overcome that takes a tremendous amount of effort and understanding as to what makes things work and not work.

Q: What are the differences between subdivisions and communities like Little Forest Hills?

A: Planning means everything. Modern subdivisions are very poorly planned for community and for people. They’re planned for automobiles, for one thing. When you create subdivisions, which are disconnected from everything else - shopping, work and school - and are economically segregated, you’ve created a situation that encourages isolationism.

Q: How do you plan neighborhoods that will encourage strong social interaction?

A: The main thing is to be able to enter public space. There should be a public realm.

There should be something to do, places to go, places to interact with people in a casual way.

I (appreciate) some elements of modern design, but I also recognize that it can be very cold and inhuman.

Read the full interview here.

In terms of the portrayal of Plano Texas (a suburb of Dallas referred to in Subdivided), I’ve been pretty supportive of folks there when they were fighting the Wal-Mart a few years back, including in print. I had a sequence in the film about it but took it out because it had become stale, and there are other films critical of Wal-Mart out already. Plano is used as a symbol in the film, though some people will take it for a wholesale bashing. For many people in city neighborhoods, Plano represents the kind of suburbia they do not want anything to do with, and in fact a number of them left there because of the poor state of some of the neighborhoods. They are not all like this, of course.

I also wanted to portray some of the class issues in a subtle way: many of the working class Little Forest Hills residents have an outright dislike for the upper middle class and the “soulless suburbs.” I do not think its entirely defensible or rational, but it was pretty much universal, hence its prominence in the film. It also goes the other way. Looking at the Frisco-online forums you see the opposite perspective: people who react strongly to criticism of their lifestyle of big homes and SUV’s and have little sympathy or interest in the concerns of the bohemian urban dweller. Everybody has blind spots.

So Plano ends up being chosen as a symbol because, well, it was there right in front of me (and I had a lot of photos). But also because I was (a) emotionally offended in that the community spirit where I was living was nil, (b) visually assaulted by the design, and (c) politically offended because a lack of community is bad for democracy. J. S. Mill, I’m paraphrasing here, said that without participation in public life, there is no collective interest and people are not participants in a democracy, they are competitors. John Dewey, one of my preferred philosophers, said “liberty and equality isolated from communal life are abstractions… Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.”

So there’s a two fold response here. One is that the portrayal of Plano in Subdivided is a representation of class perspectives, and ones I do not necessarily share, and two that it is a critique of design, and a message to those developing communities to not make the same mistakes, and to consider other ideas about how to design their communities. The idea is to end up with neighborhoods rather than just subdivisions.

I live very near Plano now and spend a good deal of time there. My son goes to school in Plano. My critique via Subdivided is a way of participating in the civic life, to help generate discussion and debate, and to hopefully help a few people see some things slightly differently.

Feedback on the KERA screening - what are your thoughts?

Had some interesting comments and questions during the radio interview on 90.1 KERA today (which I’ll upload later), and I’ve received quite a few email comments. Please feel free to leave your thoughts and stories in the comments section below.

If you would like to get a DVD when they are released soon send me an email at [list at subdivided.net]. And check back here soon for extended interviews, video extras, and outtakes. I shot some 60 hours of video and there are lots of interesting bits that did not make it into the film.

Finally, if you would like to keep up with my future film, internet, and writing projects send me a note at [dean at deanterry.com] and I’ll put you on a mailing list, or just check deanterry.com from time to time.

I’ll respond to some of the many emails I’ve received shortly. Meanwhile here’s a response to comments I’ve heard regarding the nature of documentary film itself.

Subdivided will air on PBS Station KERA in early January. Here are the dates and times:
• Wednesday January 3rd 8PM (Premiere)
• Saturday January 6th @ 3am (Tivo / DVR special!)
• Tuesday January 8th @ 11pm
Thanks to the kind folks at KERA and Bart Weiss‘ Frame of Mind for making it happen.

Here’s a short trailer that will be running on KERA leading up to the broadcast.

Finally there will be a radio interview with yours truly on KERA 90.1 radio on Wednesday January 3rd @ 12pm (the day of the premiere)
National distribution and festival screenings news coming soon.