Coping with Sea Change
By Jason Karpman, City Hall Fellow San Francisco '10
Veteran’s day was this month and I owed my grandfather a phone call. He did not sound good. My mother had told me earlier this week that he had stopped eating because he was depressed. He recently had to stop driving because of health reasons, but his new lack of mobility has only made him feel worse. He said I was the third person he had talked to all week.
He asked about my fellowship and I told him how I have been learning about sea level rise at work. The topic has become of particular concern for me since working in San Francisco’s water department. As tides rise, they will intrude into our city’s storm drain system and potentially flood the city above ground. To make the rise personally relevant for my grandpa, I mentioned that I had been shown a photograph of the old Officer's Club at Fort Ord falling into the beach as the encroaching ocean reclaims it. Since my grandpa had been stationed at Ford Ord during World War II, I felt sort of conflicted about telling him something so dismal, but he said the invitation to reflect upon the past made him feel young again, so it was OK.
The topic of conversation quickly changed from sea level rise to reminiscing about life at an army post. Unlike a lot of other vets, my grandpa speaks fondly of the war. I think it was the closest he ever came to the college experience: he got to travel, continually meet new people, and live in close proximity to all his friends. I think that the desire to approximate that lifestyle again is what attracts many of us to live in cities.
I wondered how different my grandfather’s life would be today if he had lived in a city instead of the suburbs of Southern California. Would losing his ability to drive have had such a profound effect on his morale? Would living in a denser community have provided him with more opportunity for social interaction? It is difficult to predict which of our choices will have the greatest impact on our future happiness, but the quality of our social lives is inextricably linked to the design of our built environment.
I intended to write this post about sea level rise. I thought that my conversation with my grandfather would serve as a revealing anecdote to the terrifying rapidity with which our landscape is already changing. However, my grandfather’s general nonchalance around the loss of the physical structures at Fort Ord and his preference to instead talk about the loss of the social relationships with which took place there, revealed that sea level rise may have been the lesser of two evils. Living alone had already left him feeling stranded well before the water ever hits his door.
Urban policy won’t undo the hardships of growing old, or cure social isolation, but it can mitigate some of their symptoms. What if post-war development had been targeted in cities instead suburbs? What if shared space had also been included in the marketing of the American dream? Would sea levels even be rising if cars hadn’t been so prioritized in urban design? Given the predicament that city governments face in having to plan for sea level rise, we have the opportunity to address those questions and correct previous mistakes. Some parts of our cities will have to be protected, others rebuilt, and some may even be abandoned. New development will likely look very different, but my conversation with my grandfather reminded me that some essential characteristics must be fundamentally preserved: density, pedestrian mobility, and access to public space. It is because of those design principles that nearly every time I leave my apartment that I run into someone I know on the street. Like my grandfather, it’s the potential loss of that interaction that I ultimately find most terrifying.
Veteran’s day was this month and I owed my grandfather a phone call. He did not sound good. My mother had told me earlier this week that he had stopped eating because he was depressed. He recently had to stop driving because of health reasons, but his new lack of mobility has only made him feel worse. He said I was the third person he had talked to all week.
He asked about my fellowship and I told him how I have been learning about sea level rise at work. The topic has become of particular concern for me since working in San Francisco’s water department. As tides rise, they will intrude into our city’s storm drain system and potentially flood the city above ground. To make the rise personally relevant for my grandpa, I mentioned that I had been shown a photograph of the old Officer's Club at Fort Ord falling into the beach as the encroaching ocean reclaims it. Since my grandpa had been stationed at Ford Ord during World War II, I felt sort of conflicted about telling him something so dismal, but he said the invitation to reflect upon the past made him feel young again, so it was OK.
The topic of conversation quickly changed from sea level rise to reminiscing about life at an army post. Unlike a lot of other vets, my grandpa speaks fondly of the war. I think it was the closest he ever came to the college experience: he got to travel, continually meet new people, and live in close proximity to all his friends. I think that the desire to approximate that lifestyle again is what attracts many of us to live in cities.
I wondered how different my grandfather’s life would be today if he had lived in a city instead of the suburbs of Southern California. Would losing his ability to drive have had such a profound effect on his morale? Would living in a denser community have provided him with more opportunity for social interaction? It is difficult to predict which of our choices will have the greatest impact on our future happiness, but the quality of our social lives is inextricably linked to the design of our built environment.
I intended to write this post about sea level rise. I thought that my conversation with my grandfather would serve as a revealing anecdote to the terrifying rapidity with which our landscape is already changing. However, my grandfather’s general nonchalance around the loss of the physical structures at Fort Ord and his preference to instead talk about the loss of the social relationships with which took place there, revealed that sea level rise may have been the lesser of two evils. Living alone had already left him feeling stranded well before the water ever hits his door.
Urban policy won’t undo the hardships of growing old, or cure social isolation, but it can mitigate some of their symptoms. What if post-war development had been targeted in cities instead suburbs? What if shared space had also been included in the marketing of the American dream? Would sea levels even be rising if cars hadn’t been so prioritized in urban design? Given the predicament that city governments face in having to plan for sea level rise, we have the opportunity to address those questions and correct previous mistakes. Some parts of our cities will have to be protected, others rebuilt, and some may even be abandoned. New development will likely look very different, but my conversation with my grandfather reminded me that some essential characteristics must be fundamentally preserved: density, pedestrian mobility, and access to public space. It is because of those design principles that nearly every time I leave my apartment that I run into someone I know on the street. Like my grandfather, it’s the potential loss of that interaction that I ultimately find most terrifying.
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