MAINTENANCE
Every ten years or so, some major public construction falls down or apart, and we spend a few weeks worrying about our decaying infrastructure. This time, it was the bridge in Minneapolis. One of the questions nobody seems to be asking is why so few people were killed--it would be nice to know that, so as to prevent loss of life in the next disaster. But the decaying infrastructure we have always with us.
I recently finished Cullen Murphy's book Are We Rome? in which he points to physical decay and lack of maintenance as among the reasons for the decline and fall of Rome. I'm not at all sure I agree with that. The Romans were big on maintenance. Mostly it was done by private wealth, for private glory. The Romans posted plaques to people who maintained things like bridges, aqueducts, and roads. And as a result, Roman bridges, aqueducts, and roads lasted a long time. Some of them lasted a lot longer than ours. Some of them are still useable today.
But we have very little respect for maintenance and the people who do it. Maintenance is what janitors do. And housewives. And ditch-diggers. We for sure don't post bronze plaques to them. We post bronze plaques to the people who build things, or have them built, in the first place.
It would be interesting to create a map of buildings and other human constructions with indications of when they were built--kind of like the rings on a tree. It would obviously be different in different places. Many of Chicago's public improvements, like sewers, water works, electric generating plants, libraries, and public schools, were built at the end of the 19th century and early in the 20th. A lot of the public and private buildings in Chicago were built in the 1920s (including the one Mr. Dissociated and I live in.)
There was another burst of residential building in the 1950s, and a spate of public buildings (universities and public office buildings, mostly) in the 1960s. The latter (mostly made of cast concrete with flat roofs, which I think is always a bad idea in cold wet northern climates) started falling apart within 15 years. I have taught in two of the schools in question and watched the process of decay close up, while regularly walking around the buckets catching the leaks whenever it rained. One of those schools rebuilt its entire front section, where the worst leakage was; the other moved a couple of blocks west and built an entire new campus (out of red brick, by the way) which just opened last month.
Here in Chicago, our sewer and water systems are dangerously leaky but still functioning. Considering they're more than a century old, that's pretty good, but still scary. Apparently New York City's major systems are about the same age and in even worse condition. Nonetheless, when pundits bewail the conditions of our "older" cities, I have trouble taking them seriously. Our oldest city is still a whole lot younger than Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, or Benares. All of those cities have had their declines, and their rebirths. At the moment, most of them have functioning sewer and water systems.
"Deferred maintenance" may be the curse of the modern world. It's less of a problem than it used to be for automobiles, now that warranties have become a lot longer. But proper maintenance of buildings is pretty rare. The condo the Dissociated family lives in (built sometime around 1920) is in surprisingly good condition except for the electrical system, which gets upgraded piecemeal from time to time, but has never been completely updated in at least 50 years. Our condo board does a good job; we have had repairs on the roof, the furnace, and the water heaters at regular intervals, and the windows were all replaced about 10 years ago. Amazingly, we have never had a special assessment--this all gets done out of our regular assessments. Which are, of course, a lot higher than those of most condo owners around here.
That's what it takes to keep an 85-year-old building in good shape. I mention all this because most people, including but not limited to condo residents, aren't willing to do it. They manage the cosmetic basics, like painting, but ignore the rest until something breaks down (at which point it's really expensive to fix.) They go on fixing things piecemeal for as long as they can afford it, and then they dump the place. This system works reasonably well for cars, but it can be a disaster for buildings. The only good thing about it is that, as buildings, and neighborhoods, and city systems, and for that matter cars, get older and more rickety, they also get cheaper. Which is the only reason poor people in America have anyplace to live or anything to drive.
This is the trickle-down theory of urban planning. No, I'm not being facetious. Some years ago, some local politician proposed an aggressive program of maintenance for buildings and systems in Chicago. He was immediately denounced by one of the alderman from a particularly down-and-dirty ward, for plotting to drive poor people out of the city. Similarly, I used to work for an organization called the Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing, representing local tenants. One of the landlord lawyers half-seriously suggested that we rename ourselves the Lawyers' Committee for More Expensive Housing, except that of course, we would lose our client population if we did. The market works. One of the ways in which it works is that poor people can afford only the housing etc. that nobody with more money would want. If we really did maintain our buildings properly, our cities would be surrounded by shantytowns.
As I am fond of telling my students, this requires more thought.
I recently finished Cullen Murphy's book Are We Rome? in which he points to physical decay and lack of maintenance as among the reasons for the decline and fall of Rome. I'm not at all sure I agree with that. The Romans were big on maintenance. Mostly it was done by private wealth, for private glory. The Romans posted plaques to people who maintained things like bridges, aqueducts, and roads. And as a result, Roman bridges, aqueducts, and roads lasted a long time. Some of them lasted a lot longer than ours. Some of them are still useable today.
But we have very little respect for maintenance and the people who do it. Maintenance is what janitors do. And housewives. And ditch-diggers. We for sure don't post bronze plaques to them. We post bronze plaques to the people who build things, or have them built, in the first place.
It would be interesting to create a map of buildings and other human constructions with indications of when they were built--kind of like the rings on a tree. It would obviously be different in different places. Many of Chicago's public improvements, like sewers, water works, electric generating plants, libraries, and public schools, were built at the end of the 19th century and early in the 20th. A lot of the public and private buildings in Chicago were built in the 1920s (including the one Mr. Dissociated and I live in.)
There was another burst of residential building in the 1950s, and a spate of public buildings (universities and public office buildings, mostly) in the 1960s. The latter (mostly made of cast concrete with flat roofs, which I think is always a bad idea in cold wet northern climates) started falling apart within 15 years. I have taught in two of the schools in question and watched the process of decay close up, while regularly walking around the buckets catching the leaks whenever it rained. One of those schools rebuilt its entire front section, where the worst leakage was; the other moved a couple of blocks west and built an entire new campus (out of red brick, by the way) which just opened last month.
Here in Chicago, our sewer and water systems are dangerously leaky but still functioning. Considering they're more than a century old, that's pretty good, but still scary. Apparently New York City's major systems are about the same age and in even worse condition. Nonetheless, when pundits bewail the conditions of our "older" cities, I have trouble taking them seriously. Our oldest city is still a whole lot younger than Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, or Benares. All of those cities have had their declines, and their rebirths. At the moment, most of them have functioning sewer and water systems.
"Deferred maintenance" may be the curse of the modern world. It's less of a problem than it used to be for automobiles, now that warranties have become a lot longer. But proper maintenance of buildings is pretty rare. The condo the Dissociated family lives in (built sometime around 1920) is in surprisingly good condition except for the electrical system, which gets upgraded piecemeal from time to time, but has never been completely updated in at least 50 years. Our condo board does a good job; we have had repairs on the roof, the furnace, and the water heaters at regular intervals, and the windows were all replaced about 10 years ago. Amazingly, we have never had a special assessment--this all gets done out of our regular assessments. Which are, of course, a lot higher than those of most condo owners around here.
That's what it takes to keep an 85-year-old building in good shape. I mention all this because most people, including but not limited to condo residents, aren't willing to do it. They manage the cosmetic basics, like painting, but ignore the rest until something breaks down (at which point it's really expensive to fix.) They go on fixing things piecemeal for as long as they can afford it, and then they dump the place. This system works reasonably well for cars, but it can be a disaster for buildings. The only good thing about it is that, as buildings, and neighborhoods, and city systems, and for that matter cars, get older and more rickety, they also get cheaper. Which is the only reason poor people in America have anyplace to live or anything to drive.
This is the trickle-down theory of urban planning. No, I'm not being facetious. Some years ago, some local politician proposed an aggressive program of maintenance for buildings and systems in Chicago. He was immediately denounced by one of the alderman from a particularly down-and-dirty ward, for plotting to drive poor people out of the city. Similarly, I used to work for an organization called the Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing, representing local tenants. One of the landlord lawyers half-seriously suggested that we rename ourselves the Lawyers' Committee for More Expensive Housing, except that of course, we would lose our client population if we did. The market works. One of the ways in which it works is that poor people can afford only the housing etc. that nobody with more money would want. If we really did maintain our buildings properly, our cities would be surrounded by shantytowns.
As I am fond of telling my students, this requires more thought.
posted by WiredSisters at 3:15 PM
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