​Last Tuesday, our senior men’s baseball game got called off due to rain. Not just any type of rain. But, rain that lambasted you. Soaked you till you shivered. Hammered you.
 
We came in off the field, hoping to get in one more at-bat. The south sky looked ominous. Still, you couldn’t tell the storm was about to hit.
 
Then, whammo. Large drops pelted us. Wind started. The pace increased. Then whoooo boy, it was hold onto your hat, pack your bags and get ready to run.

Except the parking lot was a couple of hundred yards away through sheeting rain that barely allowed you to see. We stood in the dugout, pretending we were protected.
 
That was a joke. With no wall facing the direction of the wind, the horizontal onslaught of water blasted us under the awning. Our team all moved to the far edge of the dugout, hoping it would provide slight protection. No dice.
 
We all congregated behind the helmet rack, 11-12 grown old men trying to hide from nature, as this position was the only place that offered a wall. We joked, chattered to each other, trying to decide whether to make a run for it.

In these situations, your clothes are saturated in seconds. The temperature dropped precipitously (15 degrees in a few minutes, to be exact). You don’t want to be there.

When is the last time you can remember being caught in a storm with no place to go? When is the last time you honestly got so wet from a rainstorm that your shoes squished when you walked?  Probably a number of years, I would imagine.
 
This incident took me back to 1982, when I bicycled across North America, and multiple times had to withstand thunderstorms of similar intensity. Then and now, what I felt was a sense of “what the heck am I doing out here,” and then later an incredible thankfulness for having survived.
 
On that bike trip, there were 3-4 storms I encountered in those four months on the road. The worst was just outside Manhattan, KS. I rode into a state park late in the day to set up camp for the night. It was Midwest hot and humid. No air.
 
The campground was packed, easily 35-40 campers, mostly RVs, and some tents sprinkled in. As I lay trying to fall asleep, you could feel the stillness of the earth, mosquitoes buzzing the net of my tent. The ground below me began to shake. I could feel the storm, many many miles away the bolts of lightning thudding.
 
When it hit, my tent was defenseless. I moved under a shelter and clung to a picnic table, praying for survival. The storm blew through in less than an hour. I finally slept, nothing inside the tent dry.
 
In the morning the campgrounds were empty except for a few RVs, including one in the site next to me. The husband and wife came out to greet the day, I’m sure just as thankful as me to be alive. They asked, “We thought you’d knock on our camper door to come in during the storm. You should have.”
 
Oddly, I’d never considered that. Just wanted to make it through the night. I did.
 
You don’t have many moments like that in life, where you plant a kiss on the earth and offer sincere prayers of thanks. It shakes you up, makes you appreciate what you have in life – the chance to take on a new day with a changed perspective, appreciative of the opportunity to do something more down the road. Take on the day.

A wind blasting torrential thunderstorm on the baseball field isn’t the same thing as what I faced in Manhattan, yet it serves as a reminder of our fragile lives.

​A number of weeks back, someone prompted me on an issue we’d discussed, wondering whether I’d taken action on the item. When quizzed by this other person regarding how/when I’d followed up, I said I didn’t remember. This puzzled my conversational partner.
 
I thought about the puzzlement for a few seconds, and said the reason I didn’t take any next step or even remember the issue under consideration, was because, “It was low on my priority list of remembering things.”
 
When I made that statement, I thought to myself, “That’s so appropriate.”
 
How often do we forget things? Why do we forget things? What do we CHOOSE to remember?
 
I highlight the word “choose” because I believe that is what it comes down to when we remember something that could be trivial or not necessarily mean action is necessary or immediate. If we are to remember items of this type, we must commit to them. We must prioritize them in our brains.

Thirty years ago, as a reporter in Washington, D.C., I covered EPA’s Superfund program, which listed the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites under their National Priority List, or NPL. The goal was to identify and cleanup the most contaminated sites in the U.S.
 
Maybe our brains need to develop an NPL, determining the most important action items in our lives. This would be difficult, particularly because what one person gives priority to is not the same as what you or I might identify as a top priority.

EPA had the advantage of skilled experts finding the bad sites and analyzing them. They used data points, measured, analyzed and ranked the sites to build the most effective NPL.
 
If we could do that in our daily lives, we’d probably be more efficient, though we might not make our friends and colleagues happy if we used different criteria to prioritize, which, of course, would be the case. “Yo, I thought you committed to meet me for a beer Friday night after work at Bullwinkles.”
 
“Ah, sorry. I thought we were just considering meeting. I didn’t know we’d set a firm date. Sorry. Let’s try it again sometime.”
 
Those types of communication breakdowns happen all the time when a date falls low on your priority list. Because it wasn’t a big thing, it fell down in your rankings.
 
Changing the cat litter, for example, can fall low on your priority list. Similarly, vacuuming up cat hair from your carpet can be a low priority. Putting the dishes from the sink into the dishwasher has a low prioritization for many people. Picking up clothes from the floor and placing them in the laundry hamper can easily become a low priority. And, so on.
 
These little things can lead to bigger things though, making it important that you properly file away your priorities. You have to put thought into it. This won’t just happen, like saying to yourself, “Tomorrow I’ll mow the grass,” when you know darn well you’re going to play golf and have a few beers afterwards.
 
You need to be honest with yourself, recognize what’s important and set up mental reminders, which to me often means pasting a yellow sticky note on my forehead. Just kidding. But, seriously, a little written note on the breakfast placemat does wonders for those daily reminders. You just need to put that note high on your personal priority list.

Where did all the magazines go? I’m not talking about the news stores either, those phantastic places where you used to be able to go and browse through Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic, Outside, Bicycling and so many more magazines people actually read.
 
No, though the newsstand is a goner, I’m talking about waiting rooms. Where did the magazines go in our doctor, dentist, physical therapist, workout facility lounges, chiropractor waiting rooms?
 
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, Covid killed the magazines. All those germs waiting around on the pages planning to annihilate your immune system. That’s over though. It’s been over for years.
 
So, where are the magazines in our waiting rooms today? Why haven’t they returned?
 
I’m slightly puzzled by this. On one hand, once something changes, people and systems often don’t readjust to a new reality. In this case, the decision was made to eliminate magazines due to health safety reasons. Though that threat is currently minimal at best, since the new system is in place, no one clamors to change it.

The other reason we haven’t reverted to spending time perusing mags while we wait to get worked on is because we’ve changed. It’s probably slightly more accurate to say: the reading habits of the citizens of the United States (and world) have decreased to the point that almost nobody purchases and reads magazines. This is the more valid argument.
 
The smartphone has supplanted many things in our lives. In particular, books that you could open and page through and magazines where you could flip through pages have suffered if not downright disappeared in favor of online venues. They are published less often than 15 years ago, if not downright disappeared.

This came home to me in the past 6-7 years or so. I’d subscribed to Sports Illustrated (SI) for decades. Then, it didn’t seem to be coming as frequently. I had to go online to figure out what happened (in all fairness, I probably overlooked any snail mail they sent telling me they were reducing the number of weekly editions they published).
 
This didn’t just happen once. Over a period of 3-4 years, SI again reduced its published number of issues. At some point they went to once a month, then to once every other month. Sadly, because I always liked that they put extra time into their writing to give perspective on sports-related issues, I finally canceled the subscription because I wasn’t getting the magazine often enough to even care about it.
 
They are an example of the death of magazines (the ones you hold in your hands and page through). There are (at a minimum) hundreds of other examples of magazines that lost readers or found the reading public with a shorter and shorter attention span.

Maybe this is influencing the doctors, dentists and chiropractors of the world. Because they or their employees or their patients don’t read and dump their old issues on the waiting room tables, we’re left with nothing but to pull out our phones and stare blankly into them. Ouch.
 
Covid killed the waiting room table magazines. But we could have brought them back. The tide has gone out. Will it come back? It doesn’t appear so at this point in history.

​Our education system misses the boat on many classes students could use in our rapidly changing world. If you’re a thinking person, you’ve probably thought of classes that every student could use to better adjust to society and prepare for complexity and tough situations they might encounter in the years ahead.
 
Having discussions with friends and colleagues on these types of issues, I often hear “financial management” as a necessary class that is not taught (investing, preparing for retirement, balancing your checkbook/budget; little and big stuff). Another one that arises during conversations is comparative religion – teaching all the world great religions so teenagers enter the adult world with a more rounded perspective on the beliefs of others.

The potential subjects are almost endless. I’m confident you have thought of your own.

Here are three of my favorites that roll around my head. Two are relatively new to my thought processes (one in the last few months and the other in the past year or so), while the other has bounced around my brain for 3-4 years.
 

1. Artificial intelligence (AI): This one has cropped up most recently. We need to teach what AI is, how it acts, what it means for jobs, how it will change the workforce and our REALITY. The implications are so thorough that we can’t afford not to teach our youth in-depth about AI. Whether you like it or fear it, AI is going to affect all of us for many years to come. Being prepared is critical for each of us.
2. BS detection of memes and deep fakes: This one has arisen over the past year or so. I keep telling a good friend he needs to create a business where people send him deep fakes and he analyzes them (he has the skills to do this professionally) to determine true or false, manipulated or accurate. We are living this world. We are crushed with images and phrases that have been changed and charged to cause you to feel something that’s not true. The only way to understand these types of is to have a BS detector. A well taught class would prepare us, and this is a survival skill in our ever-more-digitized world.
3. Anger/conflict management: This is a personal favorite and one I’ve discussed vehemently with many people over the years (more on that in a sec). This mandated class for high school students would be designed to help identify angry people and situations and give you the tools on how to mitigate the conflict, dial back rage.

Several years back, I wrote extensively to all my elected representatives, suggesting this as an important course for high school students (and their lives as they continued to mature and grow through the years). Given the number of school shootings in the United States, it is a realistic and doable alternative to mitigate some of the mass shootings that occur far too often in our society. It would arm students with tools to understand and identify when someone is going off the rails, and step forward with solutions.

Alone, it is not going to cure the world. But it is a step. None of my federal or state elected officials responded to my emails suggesting they develop and push for this type of legislation to build an anger/conflict management program in our schools. That sadly says something about the state of our elected officials. While I didn’t expect an immediate “yes, this is great and I’m going to adopt everything you wrote and sponsor a bill,” I did expect a rational response that supported the intent of what I’d written to them.
 
Those are three worthwhile classes if we’re going to have a next generation adaptive to changing technology, visual manipulation, outright lies and people who struggle to handle complexity without popping a blood vessel in their foreheads. Let’s hope someone listens. Feel free to share this column with your elected officials. Maybe something will happen.

​Weird how quickly movies disappear from the theaters these days. This is not new. Probably, if you pay attention, you’ve noticed this has been the case for 10 years or more.
 
You see an ad. You decide you want to go with your partner. You talk about it. Somehow you agree that you both want to see the flick. This process takes three weeks. You go online to check times for the coming weekend, and what the heck, it’s gone. Poof. Disappeared.
 
It’s called the disappearing movie syndrome (DMS). DMS affects most, but not all, movies. Identified blockbusters (who chooses to apply that mantle to a show is anybody’s guess, but it’s not you and me) stick around longer. Sometimes three or four weeks.
 
Though I exaggerate that point about how long a great (or high attendance) movie stays in theater, I’m not exaggerating by much. If you even think you want to go see a movie in the past decade, you pretty much need to decide that first week or two and then GO. If not, DMS takes over and it’s gone. You forget about it. And, you’ll likely never take the time to look it up on a streaming service and give it a viewing. There are far too many other entertainments options and our small brains don’t have the capacity to care or catalogue the flicks you want to watch enough to make that effort.
 
A couple of months back, during some daydreaming time, I looked up the current movie suite in our local theater. “Whoa, I’d like to see this. Man, this one sounds good, I should check it out. That’s a unique sounding plot; I should go.”
 
I selected several that charged my batteries. I wrote them down (and, of course, still have that list, hence this incredible column). They included: “Novocaine”; “Black Bag”; “The Monkey”; “Riff Raff”; “Queen of the Ring”; “A Working Man”; “Mickey 17.”
 
How many did I see? I’ll give you a moment to realistically consider this. Think about what else you do in your life, what grabs your attention, what stops you from even going out to the theater, other things that clutter your life. Now, out of those seven movies, how many did I watch?
 
You probably guessed right: two. “Mickey 17” and “Riff Raff” were the two I went to. What did this depend on? Was it convenience in terms of time and theater location? Did I rank them and go to the best first?
 
Quite frankly, for me, time and location became an initial deciding variable. Then, it became apparent that the others weren’t going to be around and other things in life took over, and poof, there they went to the ether. “Queen of the Ring” gone the day after I first looked. “Novocaine” gone in one week. “Black Bag” gone in two weeks. “The Monkey” disappearing in three weeks.
 
My life is not a failure because of this. But it makes for interesting observations about popular culture and why we don’t have as much of a shared culture as we did 30-40 years ago. Because of the fracturing and hyper intensity of the movie market, they come and go astoundingly fast. Blink and you miss one.
 
When I graduated from college, the movie “Grease” was in our theater in Ottawa, IL. I AM NOT KIDDING YOU, but that movie stayed in town the entire two years I lived there. Yeah, great movie, but there must not have been a lot of other flicks hitting the market.
 
A few years earlier, I remember “Jaws” hanging around our Kankakee, IL downtown theater for months and months and months. It was a great movie, no question about it. But in today’s world, it would get a month run, maybe.
 
We can’t keep up. The speed of entertainment options exceeds our capacity to observe, absorb and handle (make a decision to go or not to go). We’re all slammed by this. Most of us turn personal filters on. Or we completely ignore numerous movies and other entertainment sectors promoted towards us. It’s the only way to survive. Walls up. Block them out. Forget they exist. Move on, pick up a book.

​Over the past five years I’ve been playing old man baseball on two teams. That’s hardball. The two leagues, one for players ages 55+ and the other for 62+, are loaded with athletes wanting to continue competing despite sometimes compellingly told by our bodies to cease and desist.
 
I say that because of the injuries which occur every season. So far – keeping fingers crossed – I’ve avoided major injuries. One year, I tugged a hamstring, but soldiered on. Another year, while batting, the force of the fastball upon making contact with my bat contorted my right elbow in a direction it didn’t want to go. Icing, Advil, and an arm sleeve for compression allowed my continued participation, but it was excruciatingly painful for several weeks.

The body does not agree with what your heart desires. It tells you to rest, quit or retire. Most of the players in both leagues deal with these types of season/career-defining injuries. Resting and rejuvenating are critically important to keep yourself on the active playing list.
 
Each year (as the oldest player on our 55+ team) for the past three seasons, I advise newcomers on physical survival. I speak from experience, and wanting new teammates to stay healthy playing the game they love.
 
Here are the tips: Stretch before every at bat; don’t try to sprint (instead, taking baby steps before slowly accelerating as you run the bases or chase a ball); if at all possible, avoid sliding and diving; take it slow.
 
My teammates nod their heads. They understand. They agree. Mentally, they recognize the need to follow this advice. But, do they? Of course not.

Instead, competitive instinct and the heart take over as players repeatedly try to beat out a ground ball, steal a base, or make a spectacular diving catch on the outfield grass. Is this a good idea? Again, of course not.
 
What happens in these situations? You can predict the outcomes – torn rotator cuffs; ACL tears; pulled and torn hamstrings; twisted ankles; torn ligaments. You name it.

Of the new teammates each season, typically three get injured and are either out for the season or must miss 5-6 weeks rehabilitating an injury. Most recently, as we started this season, four of the 12 players on our roster got hurt during our opening game. One popped his hamstring in the following game and appears out for the season, despite being urged to take it slow and easy, and to be careful. He dove back to third on a play, and that was that. We all felt his pain as he lay face down on the dirt.
 
As this information was related to two good friends, they amusingly said we should change the name of our team to “The Arthritics.” We all laughed at this. We kicked around other names, including, “The Cracked Bones,” “The Sore and Grouchies,” “The Strained Muscles,” “Muscle Tearers,” “Leg Benders,” and “Ankle Crushers.” We had a good laugh batting these around on email.
At one point the suggestion was made to approach someone of decision-making power at a local Milwaukee area hospital to see if they would sponsor our team. Maybe an orthopedic practice. They could make some money off us.
 
The injuries will not go away because almost every player loves the game too much and won’t retire until the pain is non-negotiable. It happens to everyone at some point.
 
We slog it out. We have fun. We beat ourselves up. We cheer for our teammates. We agonize over their injuries, and our own. We take the field again and again for love, the joy of being on the field, the spring breeze, smelling fresh cut grass, the eternal mashing of the ball and watching it soar, flinging a pitch past a flailing hitter or making a diving catch to secure a victory.
 
The body retaliates. But love keeps resurfacing.

​In his new book, “Irresistible,” Adam Alter touches on the rise of the technology-inducing hooks that grab our attention, drain our attention spans, and keep us doing things over and over, mostly to our detriment. It’s a worthwhile read.
 
He historically tracks those things that have proven irresistible to us humans over time – alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex, over-eating, working out, and more. The most recent urges aren’t as apparent as those 15-50 years ago as they are tied to online/electronic services – texting, email, social media, gambling, video games, shopping, for example.
 
He covers how companies set us up to want their product/service more and more, the research that goes into inducing repetitive behavior that becomes increasingly more difficult to break. The behaviors are typically to our detriment. We gamble too much. We play video games for hours on end with little to no breaks for food, water or sleep. We find ourselves searching and searching for the best deal on comfortable shoes because we can and the options are tantalizingly put in front of us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
 
One section stood out to me. Actually, more explicitly, an action by one company addressed in one of the chapters of the book stood out to me. It was how they approached freeing up their employees to relax and not feel tethered to their electronic devices 24-7. It’s simple. When you hear it, you’ll whack yourself on the side of your head, and say to yourself, “Why the heck didn’t I think of that?”
 
Given the stress that many employees express in today’s work world about having to be connected at all times, the company in Alter’s example chose to shut down a major stressor. How?
 
When you go on vacation, they set up their email system to deliver messages back to the sender telling them that the person they are trying to reach is not available and they must wait until that person returns to work to communicate with them. They also put a note giving another contact if the communication was an emergency.

The point about this action that struck me the most, and Alter points this out, is: you can now go on vacation without coming back to 972 emails after one week of relaxation. You come back to work to an empty email box.

That might feel weird. You would probably have to psychologically and emotionally adjust to that. But, consider how you would feel while on vacation, and coming back to your office relaxed, smiling, feeling rested and revved to take on your job again, knowing you can ease into things rather having your blood pressure rise the instant you walked through the door.
 
Now, they probably need a similar system with voice mail just to be safe, so people don’t circumvent the concept by trying to tie people down with work through voice mail while they’re on the cruise or camping trip of a lifetime.
 
This de-stressor is a phenomenal idea, so let’s share it far and wide. Send this column to everyone you know. Maybe that will create some impact.
 
While this action only solves the issue of over-connectedness relative to your vacation time, it can also be implemented for non-work-hour related communications. Businesses could choose this system as a regular mode of operation, for example, only allowing communications during certain hours of the day.

This can be done. Will it? Will those irresistible urges continue to hit us at all hours? We can limit the beeps and clicks and likes (all those dopamine-inducing sounds and actions in electronic communication devices and sites) if we choose to. 

​Dear Rory,
 
I am tremendously pleased with your victory last week at the Masters Golf Tournament, making you only the sixth person in history to win all four major men’s golf tourneys (which include the U.S. Open, British Open and PGA Championship, along with the Masters). It was a scintillating four days, IMO, and perhaps the most draining and competitive major championship I have watched in my life. Checking my faulty memory banks, I’m highly confident I recorded and watched (fast forwarding through much of the “inaction”) close to 100 percent of the golfing.
 
Back to you. You were an all-time great before you completed this “career grand slam.” You would have remained a career all-time great without winning the Masters. I get it. You wanted it. It dangled in front of you, tantalizing your emotions. The announcers and media pounded on you year after year about how you needed it to secure your status with those five other golfers – Jack Nicklaus, Gene Sarazen, Tiger Woods, Gary Player and Ben Hogan.  Your greatness didn’t need that win.

Yes, you’ve now checked an elite box. You stand with those five other guys until someone else comes along and becomes the seventh. Scottie Scheffler will likely tap on the door in the next five years and ask to enter that room.
 
That’s won’t make Scottie an all-time great. Instead, like you, it will be because over a long period of time he wins, competes, finishes annually at or near the top of the PGA tour. The media and many people are obsessed with winning, which only one person does in golf on any given week, competing against 119+ entrants on average. That means when you win on any given week, you are better than the top one percent (.83 percent to be exact) of the VERY BEST GOLFERS IN THE WORLD.
That statistic means that in your 29 career wins, you’ve finished ahead of 99.17 percent of competing golfers. You’re great. That’s great.
 
Let’s get back to those people who pigeonhole greatness, wanting to define it for you, putting that pressure on. What they have to say doesn’t matter. They’re talking heads. They’re not out on the course week after week, battling weather conditions, all those spectacular competitors, sore bodies, lapses in concentration, unlucky breaks. Each golfer on the PGA Tour, in contrast, does.
 
Things don’t always go your way. Every golfer knows that. It’s a great lesson for everyone who plays golf. I imagine most thinking people who pick up the clubs recognize this. There are bad days, bad weeks, years. Life intervenes. An argument with your spouse or the death or birth of a loved one changes your perspective and how you approach the game. It affects your swing. It affects you much you enjoy the nature of the game, which should typically involve relaxation and elements of a Zen perspective on the world – oneness with the shots you make.
 
Before winning the Masters, Rory, you’d already conquered four other majors (winning the PGA twice). That’s pretty darn great. You’ve won the FedEx Cup three times (the reasonably new end-of-the-year three-round tournament to crown the best player for the year on the PGA Tour). The only other player to win even two FedEx Cups is Tiger Woods. That’s great company. You are at the top of that list.
 
Don’t let the pundits and media define you, Rory. Define yourself. It’s clear, given your reactions after pulling off your stunning victory last week, that you placed a gigantic burden on yourself and wanted the Masters incredibly badly. I get it. You deserve it.
 
I’ve rooted for you for the 18 years you’ve been on the PGA Tour. I will continue to root for you regardless of whether you win another major. IMHO, you have been the greatest golfer on the Tour for the last 15 years. Others have had a run at you, and yeah, Scottie is crushing it these past three years. But, your body of work, which defines GREATNESS, is the best if you look cumulatively the past 15 years. That’s a ton of victories. And many, many other top ten finishes. That’s greatness, Rory. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
 
FORE!

​Ideas for this column arise in multiple ways. One is from friends who email me something that gets me thinking, laughing, philosophizing, wondering. When one of those emotions is charged, I save the email and let it percolate.
 
Sometimes the percolation lasts for weeks, sometimes months, and occasionally for years. The phrase “annihilating city crowding” was the topic of one of those emails I pulled from my pile, and ironically it was dated almost exactly to today’s date two years ago. A bit of serendipity.
 
The genesis of the email thread had to do with “issues that destroy our society.” The word “destroy” is a bit strong. The theme was more about what is a big issue that causes major problems for our society in the United States.
 
My writing friend posited two as quoted here: “The two big issues that destroy our society are boredom in rural areas and overcrowding in cities.” Let that percolate a bit.
 
There’s a lot that goes into both of those issues – causes, intensity levels depending on where you live exactly, the size of a metro (what is too big?) or rural (when is it too small?) area, homogeneity of the community, the growth or contraction that the community has experienced in the past 10-30 years, and more. We’re stereotyping here in forming judgments generically about these two types of communities.
 
Anyway, my friend wrote the solution in the email, a bit simplistic, as follows: “Destroy small town boredom; annihilate city crowding.” There you have it. Slap your hands, dust them off, and the problem(s) are solved. Or that is just a small start toward problem solving.
 
As most thinking people recognize, nothing is that simple. But there is a huge truth in the two points from my friend.
 
They are this: In rural communities, there is a greater need for services, jobs, businesses necessary for life’s basic necessities. Those towns could lack access to a hospital or internet service. Population loss could mean closing schools and students having to be bussed 30-100 miles to consolidate with the closest high school. The only supermarket might have closed. And, so on.
 
In cities, on the other hand, stress, traffic congestion, rising prices of housing are but three of the major outcomes due to consolidating too many people in a give square mile. We are not meant to live in those types of crowded conditions, and it often leads to sewage, air pollution, electrical grid capacity and garbage taxing systems not designed to absorb higher populations. Services can’t keep up.
 
There were a couple simple planks to my writer friend’s presidential platform that we elaborated in the email. On destroying small town boredom: “Install a movie theater with rotating venues of old movies, comedy clubs, concerts in towns with populations 1,000-10,000.”
 
On annihilating city crowding: “Mandate bike/hike paths with greenery to wind through any new or redeveloped parcel of land in communities with populations over 100,000.”
 
Simplistic, yes. Doable, yes. And, there are many communities dealing with these issues and taking on solutions along the lines noted above.
 
I think what we both took away from our email conversation was that we need to recognize as a first step the different challenges for communities based on population and transportation connectedness. It’s going to take individuals, communities, businesses, leadership and government to come together because deep thought and long-term planning is the only way for us to make this happen. It’s not going to happen overnight. We need to all roll up our sleeves and get to work.

For those of you who read my weekly musings, this column might be a bit different. The thoughts that follow are ones I’ve voiced to many over the past 10 years or so regarding the future of housing and cities in the United States – thoughts that we must think about, deliver and reconstruct for our next generation to have affordable lives.
 
There is an ebb and flow to life, history, cities, products we use. Some things go up in price. Neighborhoods become sought after, or, conversely, they may decline into a dump. Roads deteriorate. Others are nicely paved over on a regular basis.

If you look at development in this country over the past 50 years or so, the industrial northern cities have declined. The southern cities, with the introduction of air conditioning in the 1960s, have flourished, adding population and youth from the declining manufacturing cities in the north (a broad, but also targeted observation).
 
Housing prices followed this trend, with growth and new homes popping up more quickly in Dallas, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, etc. With more construction, based on demand, prices rose.
 
Many factors go into the rapidly rising costs of homes (and cars and college and medical care) – cost of raw materials, safety requirements, energy, labor. In those southern and coastal cities, with the added push of population growth, prices accelerated.
 
Conversely during this period broadly encompassing the past 50 years, cities like Toledo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Buffalo and more have stagnated or declined. The urban core became a skeleton. People left. The housing stock deteriorated. You could buy a small home or a condo more cheaply.

If we are going to have affordable housing for more people in the United States, it’s these cities that we must focus on. Builders, private capital and investment should more and more target those cities to reshape their future in a vibrant way. It’s about the only way I can see the next generation achieving what has been an American dream to own your home.
 
The Boston, L.A., New York City, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Seattle metro areas are totally unaffordable in terms of a home purchase for 95-98 percent of our population from what I read and discuss with people I know who live in those urban areas. Those cities all face problems in terms of finding people to fill jobs of all types who make less than (insert your high dollar amount here) dollars. If you don’t make XX, you can’t live there, and often can’t live anywhere remotely nearby, so you live in a tent, at the YMCA, 62 miles down the highway (with a 90-minute commute, or more) a van down by the river or buddy up with 12 other people in a group home. I don’t know how, but some people make it work.
The broader, conceptual point we must consider as a country is “where should people be living?” When places become so popular, only the uber elite can afford to live there (and raise a family), we must look elsewhere.

That’s where my reinvigorating Toledo perspective comes into play, something, as I noted above, I’ve ranted about to many people for at least 10 years. Offer incentives. Cities must look for ways to bring youth to their core, to invest in such a way to create that attractive environment that reverses decline into an incline. Move up rather than move out.

This can be done. Make no mistake about it. In some ways, due to necessity, it is already happening. Major smart growth and rehabbing is occurring in Milwaukee and Detroit, and I would be confident in other similar cities (without having that exact data in front of me).
 
Affordable homes can drive this equation, or actually become the reward for those who choose to take the personal initiative to bring back a declining neighborhood. This IS happening and will continue to happen, but with greater visibility and local pushing, we will find the livable cities in the future are the industrial declining cities of the past.