Posted on by Eileen Young

Strangeness and Charm

The title is a reference to an album by Florence and the Machine, but is also a bit the heart of the matter.

Part of the ongoing discussions in my community about a new development (here, here, and here with a website I’m only a contributor to here) has circled around what the charm of the village actually is, and preserving it. So I wanted to write up what charmed me as part of working towards the general.

We had been looking at houses from Delaware on Zillow and Redfin and Homes.com, and then, when we came back, there was a perfect weekend where we hit seven or eight open houses. Then we came out to Mount Horeb, because this was the only house on our list not hosting an open house, but we wanted to look at it. One of the houses we’d looked at ticked most of our boxes in terms of history and walkability but the dining room window faced directly onto a church playground – the kind that is used by daycares during the week. Because I work from home, the noise of cheerful shrieking children that close made the house a hard no. So we came out to look at what is now our house, and saw the phlox in the garden in riotous bloom. We fell in love with the house. It is the only showing we scheduled, and we walked out ready to put in an offer.

But we also, that first day, drove around Mount Horeb. I knew I would want to join local interest groups of some kind or do something to build local community, both because community is important to me and because I needed some way to build local friendships. I’d spent one summer in Mount Horeb as a teenager, and remembered the trolls and the Mustard Museum before it relocated, but I’d also been about a block from the pool and spent most of my time there. As an adult, I was looking for different things.

We’d noticed the Tree City USA sign on the way in, which was a positive sign. I like trees. They’re pretty and good for carbon sequestration and harboring native species of fauna. A community that values trees would be likely to also value at least some of those things and also have fewer of the sprawling vistas of bare lawn that I find repugnant.

The trail, right next to the house, had people walking along it. That was both a tremendous amenity and indicative of the presence of ‘outsidey’ people: not outdoorsy, with the camping and the cross country mountain biking and the various things that require stamina, dedication, and bug spray, but people who like an amble in natural surroundings and maybe some light gardening. Our sort of people.

Across from the house was 4th Street Ceramics, which was delightful because we like art and the ability to buy local and unique and useful art – but also a community where art is a viable career and a home studio is a viable setup. In addition to the skill of the artist, it requires a combination of cost of living, local audience (both in terms of available income to buy not just the bare necessities but the beautiful and in terms of appreciation), and safety. The tools of ones trade must be safe attached to one’s house, and likewise having all your customers know where you live must not result in an expectation of rude people knocking on your front door at 10pm. This kind of safety-from-rudeness cannot be policed away, and has to be a community standard. Which is also why the Pride flags around town, including at the church next door, were immensely reassuring. I’m visibly queer, even if the undercut and the Ace pride patch on one of my jackets are mostly only clock-able to people already in the queer community. I wasn’t worried about physical safety necessarily, because we’re in Dane County and I don’t think of many hate crimes as happening this close to Madison, where I went to West High School. But I also didn’t want to deal with low-grade hostility because that’s boring and annoying.

So we drove around town, and noted the number of Pride flags. We also noted the number of cottage gardens – those gardens with no dirt showing but a profusion of plants, both flowers and greenery – and in particular the amount of milkweed. Milkweed is the only food for monarch butterflies, which migrate up to Wisconsin during the summer months. So again there’s a value on beauty and on the environment, and milkweed in enough yards that it’s obviously a community value.

Then, of course, there are the trolls. Unique and charming in the troll capital of the world, they’re also examples of public art. I love public art as a concept, but occasionally loathe the execution (like the Bean in Chicago). But these are all delightful, and many different businesses got in on it, which again is a nice sign of community rather than some kind of corporate ideological hegemony.

Speaking of hegemony, Duluth is a towering presence in town. They’re in our backyard, quite literally. They’re a major employer. Due to my growing up in a lumber town that was impacted by the pine beetle epidemic and my spouse coming from Janesville, a GM town, we’re both leery of company towns. But the proximity to Madison and employers there, the continued rural life that means there are a number of small independent farmers, and the small businesses in the village itself, Duluth is a major community player and sponsor, but not the economic fate of the village embodied in one corporation, which is also a high point.

The small businesses and lack of chains in town is in and of itself part of the charm. There’s a Culver’s, of course, as any Wisconsin town should have, but it’s a franchise. So again the local values. Many local restaurants also proudly source local ingredients. It creates an economic independence, where a business might be short staffed but it’ll be because someone just graduated and moved away for college, not because Corporate mandates lean staffing. It makes downtown more of a living entity, able to respond to local needs as opposed to distant concepts of how a small town works.

Posted on by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

Man on a horse

One of the things I said I’d do when discussing setting up the Judge My Apocalypse package was review books with an eye to disasters. As it happens, this isn’t a review of the books themselves so much as how they interact with a particular disaster myth: the man on the horse.

The man on the horse is the tendency to point to one person as solving a problem or heading a response, someone who stands out (as if on a horse). The reality of most disasters – of most problems – is that there are a ton of people working hard and in concert in order to fix things. There’s a lot of literature about it, and about the ways communities come together, and how the act of communities coming together is in itself powerful.

But right here and now I’m less interested in the academic literature than the fantasy novels. So, the books: Captive to the Shadow Prince by Mallory Dunlin, Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher, and The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard. What they have most in common is that I was re-reading all of them recently, and re-reading offers a chance for thinking about books differently.

I was specifically re-reading Captive to look at how the magic apocalypse is handled, because I enjoy Dunlin’s books and wanted to revisit the exact parameters of why my brain doesn’t screech about sociological factors in disasters. It turns out it’s because the focus is almost entirely on the perspective characters and very high-level plans, and people at large are shown acting sensibly (getting treated by healers, evacuating from blast areas to nearby houses, not approaching seven foot monsters) but very briefly before we narrow back in on our main characters.

But because I was re-reading Captive at the same time as listening to the audiobook of Paladin’s Grace as this weekend’s accompaniment to crafting, I found myself thinking about scope and scale of action. The main characters of Captive are both cause and cure for their magic apocalypse: their abilities and positions make them pivotal to the whole shape of their world. As the seven foot monster on scene, the main male character of Captive doesn’t even need a horse to stand out. Of course main characters are main because they do make a difference in their world, and all three books I’m discussing here the main characters make positive changes in the world through expertise, ability, and love, but the way they interact with the world is different.

One of the things that drove this post is that the main male character of Paladin’s Grace is very clear on the fact that he used to be infantry before becoming a paladin: no horse for him. And, indeed, as part of the narrative he does help solve problems but as part of a superstructure wherein he answers to a bishop and frequently dismisses his own contributions to the world as being good at hitting things, carrying heavy things, and knitting socks. Even then: his world may still be full of terrors, but the people he loves will have warm feet.

The Hands of the Emperor I am re-reading because I recently recommended it to a friend and wanted to both be able to discuss it better and be inspired again in my search for work. In some ways the main character does end up as a man on a horse, because he ends up head of a world government. But it’s a story about – well, friendship and homecoming and culture, but most importantly public administration. The small incremental and deliberate policy changes that can contribute to a sweepingly better world. The fact that the first time I read it (while at the Biden School for Public Policy and Administration) I read through the night and was crying about public administration at 6am probably says a great deal about me as a person.

To the books as a collective, though. One of the things I most love about speculative fiction in general is that it lets us set a baseline for a world as it could be. One of the things I love about this particular trio of books is that it sets such different baselines for how we can make a difference in the world. The clean dramatic sweep of magically reshaping the world and the quiet stand for decency; the divinely-inspired monarchs and the public servant who dismantled the trappings of empire one piece of legislation at a time; the shining palaces and the pink socks. In their contexts, they’re all valued.

That variety is what I think I appreciate most. Real life doesn’t offer heroes very often, much less the opportunity to be the man on a horse. So I like books that offer the heroes – and also the quieter and more familiar heroes, who do their best to improve the world with the tools at their disposal. And I appreciate the authors who show that the world can be improved.

Posted on by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

Langhūs Continues

A lot of reactions to the proposed development are based on what we don’t want. Jeff Grundahl has responded to the most recent round of feedback (with over 200 attendees and dozens of pages of public comments submitted before the meeting) with a new proposal with only three stories. Which is a dramatic improvement! But there are still issues, and I’m now sitting in on a Preserve Historic Mount Horeb meeting and the aim is to be productive rather than just objecting to ideas as presented.

What would be nice in the development is:

  • accessible businesses (the buildings there, while historic, are not accessible to everyone)
  • increased traffic safety (the new plan dramatically improves it, even if it requires re-routing traffic, which shouldn’t be a given, but the corner of Main St and Third is also where children as young as 9 make their way alone to the pool in the summer)
  • bike parking (the newest proposal has 15 spaces, which is better than the 10 of the last round, but we’re aiming to be a bike friendly city and that means having it for businesses as well as residents). Wisconsin Bike Fed recommends a parking spot per unit, which would be at least 44 spaces at the new scale
  • green space (a rooftop garden in the u-shape of the proposed apartments would be a bare minimum, but a smaller building footprint would allow for more of it and prettier. Hell, the Mound Vue Garden Club could probably be persuaded to maintain a garden spot)
  • a parking ratio that’s more generous (the latest proposal is 1.2, which now technically meets code but is inadequate – I don’t think we need more retail space at the sacrifice of parking) and doesn’t have the stacked parking nonsense. Possibly also EV charging parking? I still don’t drive, but it’s an important topic that is being discussed in the meeting
  • sufficient setback for people backing into the alley from their driveways to have acceptable clearance from walls, for people to walk down the alley and safely pass a car – either outdoor parking or a courtyard to form more of a community space would address that
  • making the building look like multiple buildings, which was present in some previous iterations. Scaling up the differences with more architectural differentiation would be lovely

Having community space and green space was discussed generally as a huge positive, something that would have charm and draw people in to both the shops and Mount Horeb generally. References were made to the development in Middleton where the central green space can be rented out, providing a potential additional revenue stream. A smaller footprint overall, with setbacks and green space and maybe splitting it into actually distinct buildings are sentiments that are being raised repeatedly. The Historium is a great example of creatively splitting up spaces and facades to make a less overwhelmingly large building.

A few members also overwhelmingly prefer two stories, but that sentiment isn’t unanimous, and I actually think three stories is pretty much perfect, especially as compared to the initial proposal.

Discussing the pipe dream of if we were imagining a development from scratch to fulfill the requirements of providing new commercial apartments, the number of apartments that the group came up with was between 10 and 24. Which is a very different idea of appropriate scale. But these are the things that would be nice in a development on Main Street. We want something that continues to look nice and contributes to the picturesque nature of Mount Horeb.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Langhūs on Main Comment

The proposed plan I commented on this summer has been revised, and revised again. It now has a fairly united public response, too.

Photo from the Mount Horeb Mail, our excellent local paper. https://www.mounthorebmail.com/week-42-1

But it’s getting another hearing at the Planning Commission meeting next Wednesday. The Agenda Packet is 260 pages.

The new revised plan is much prettier than the original. The facades will be pleasant to look at from street level and blend well with downtown Mount Horeb. The remaining problems are best summed up by the grassroots campaign against it: it’s simply too big.

But there are important and identifiable components to this: lack of green space, height, and lack of parking.

The lack of green space I addressed in my last open letter as contributing to possible heat islands. It also makes the city less overtly conforming along Main Street with the Tree City USA signs around town. I mean by that both that it will detract from the overall charm that draws tourists and also detract from the perception of values espoused in Mount Horeb, which attracts tourists and shoppers overall. Including a patio for residents is an improvement over complete lack of outdoor space, but is still not green space.

Height is the sticky place: the architects have significantly redesigned, which is fantastic, so there is no longer the horrifying prominence that would dominate downtown. But it’s still too tall. It’s like the Duluth building built by the same developers: on a scale that is aggressively alien to the rest of Mount Horeb. The scale JG Development thinks is appropriate for Mount Horeb does not appear to align with the scale anyone else thinks is appropriate.

Then there is the parking. Everyone is sick of the parking. I don’t even drive. I’m so sick of the parking conversation. I’m also now on the village Green Team, one of the goals of which is more bike friendliness and helping the village be more friendly to a car-free existence. So, to be clear: I am writing my concerns about the parking as a non-driver who will be able to walk to these businesses.

But it’s 68 parking spots for 63 units plus the businesses. That’s 1.08 parking spots per unit. In densely urban areas, that could be not just adequate but generous for business parking. Imagine someone living upstairs from their workplace, or working somewhere else on Main Street. They wouldn’t need a car and would be able to walk everywhere and eat at our great restaurants. And that’s the thing: they’d pretty much always be eating out because grocery shopping by bike mostly sucks, even with as close as Miller’s is to downtown. Nic’s letter in the agenda includes some really relevant wording: the idea of a captive customer base. Because that’s what they’d be. The urban areas where parking ratios like this are generous are not picturesque village downtowns: they’re dense metro areas that have things Mount Horeb simply doesn’t, like public transit and a wide range of delivery options. The concept presented is that tenant parking will be in-building, but the math ain’t mathing.

Which is the colloquial way of saying: the code that the developers themselves quote in their letter requires:

  • A minimum of one off-street parking space shall be provided for each bedroom within a commercial apartment.

So, even if we’re not counting studios as having bedrooms, because it’s all one room, leaves us with 13 2 bedroom units and 38 1 bedroom units, for a total of 64 required parking spots. Wow, with that math, their proposed 68 spots actually looks generous.

But the current code minimum is per bedroom with an unwritten addendum of “this is a nice village, so be reasonable,” which gives us 12 studio apartments, 13 2 bedroom apartments, and 38 one bedroom apartments, for 76 minimum parking spaces and a ratio of 1.21. The proposal is for a ratio of 1.08.

Additionally, their letter frames it in a table as dwelling units, when the code is specifically for bedrooms, and the dishonesty is distinctly frustrating. At least they acknowledge later that the reasonable number of parking spaces for their proposed building, if it were anywhere but the downtown area, would be 139. That’s a ratio of 2.21.

And the parking survey addressed non-event days. Which is reasonable except for how hard everyone works on having those event days and attracting people. We invite any out-of-town guests to park in our driveway in the expectation that there will be no parking anywhere else a convenient walking distance from downtown. This could be resolved, potentially, by building a parking garage across the street from the proposed development in the empty lot already owned by JG, which could potentially have an attractive local mural added to the outside, addressing multiple problems at once. Or they could just have fewer units, which would solve more problems.

10 bike parking spaces also seems like a low number when so much is reliant on the ability to attract bike and foot traffic. In fact, if this development were in Madison, 85 bike parking spots would be required. Which is definitely a gap between the proposal and the ideals and development plan the proposal is supposed to conform to.

There are additional issues with the way their letter is presented, such as ignoring the complexities of historical designation – my own house is a 1905 traditional Queen Anne style, with colors appropriate to the Painted Lady style of Victorians popular on the West Coast and several original features including many of the windows visible from the Military Ridge Trail. But it doesn’t have a historical designation because it has undergone many renovations, it has newer features like an addition from 1923 and central air and, most crucially, we have not filed for nor requested any kind of historical designation.

But the other issues with the proposal are, of course, secondary to the main problem of the proposed development is, despite being much prettier, still inappropriate for Mount Horeb.

Posted on by Eileen Young · 2 Comments

Reactions to a Concept Proposal

On Wednesday, our village plan commission had a meeting on, amongst other things, a proposed concept for a new development on Main Street. In advance of the meeting, someone posting one of the design photos on the community Facebook pages, which resulted in not just many comments on the posts but a really tremendous turnout to the meeting itself. I haven’t been attending many of them, even though our municipal building is close and I’m subscribed to their calendar, but this got me to walk over to say my three minutes of comments and also hear out their whole proposal. After, I felt moved to then email the village administrator, who hadn’t been able to attend the meeting. I wanted to then post it in one of the Facebook groups, partly because I think sometimes people don’t have the vocabulary to articulate why they don’t like something about a building, and that’s something I’ve been able to learn something about between a grad class in historic preservation and a crippling HGTV addiction. Anyway! It wasn’t posted in the group and now I’m suspended from posting or commenting in that group for a week. Maxim of charity says that it really was quite a wall of text.

Dear [Administrator],

At the end of the planning meeting on Tuesday, attendees were encouraged to email you with further thoughts on the JG Development concept proposal. I have many thoughts! To preface: I think infill construction in that part of Main Street is a fabulous idea. As the owner of Sugar River Yarns mentioned, accessible retail space there would be not just a general step in the right direction but a specific boon to businesses with client bases with more diverse mobility needs. A Witches Night Out where more attendees can go into every single business would be delightful. Additionally, while I love the trees and shrubs on that lot, it would also be a welcome sight to see more interesting buildings and shops as I come along main street; more of a hint that Main Street is continuous rather than so thoroughly interrupted. Mixed use development such as commercial apartments are an ideal arrangement. In sum: I do not oppose progress generally, and am even in favor of development on those lots specifically. But I think the JG Development concept proposal so thoroughly missed the brief as to make continued work with them a potential waste of everyone’s time.

The things they did well, to give them their due: making it look like multiple different buildings built next to each other is an excellent nod to the composition of the 100 block of East Main Street and the included parking seems nearly sufficient for the majority of the building’s inhabitants at 69 stalls for 66 proposed units.

Still, that leaves the rest of the concept. First, JG Development’s concept is four stories, where the limit is three. Even measuring against the Opera House, it is 7 feet too tall. Included please find a picture I took yesterday as I approached the Farmer’s Market. The visuals included in the concept documents do not include context, but imagining a four story building rising from the trees and green, hulking over Sjolinds and dwarfing the Chamber of Commerce building, is frankly horrifying. The proposed prominence is a rudeness.

And that leads neatly to the architecture of the building itself. In their own words (on page 3 of their Letter of Intent), “The goal of the development aesthetic is to compliment the historic Main Street appeal of Mount Horeb, albeit most small towns anywhere.” While it is perhaps overly pedantic to point out that compliment is not the word they meant, the error seems to reflect a deeper truth: that any nods to the appeal of Mount Horeb are lip service and not reflected in substance. And, of course, there is the more obvious slight acknowledging that the developers do not see anything distinctive or worth preserving, furthering, or contributing to in Mount Horeb, anything that could not be found in “most small towns anywhere.”

That goes some way towards explaining why the entire building is thoroughly modern vernacular architecture and any design inspiration seems to have taken form as awkward applique rather than any true homage or harmony. There is nothing inherently wrong with modern vernacular architecture – obviously, or it would not be so widespread – but it is wildly incongruous with downtown Mount Horeb. We have several styles of architecture downtown, but they are notable and distinct styles, none of which include the pilasters in one segment of the proposed building. We have Norwegian architecture, with the focus on natural elements, clean lines, and pitched roofs, as evidenced in the Chamber of Commerce and Skal buildings. The Opera House as well as many other buildings in town are Queen Anne or at least influenced by it, with turrets and multiple styles of siding. A note: turrets are very different from whatever the proposed detail on the fourth floor of the JG concept is. Other buildings on Main Street are also designated as commercial vernacular, but they were vernacular at an earlier period influenced by, amongst other things, Edwardian architectural concepts of symmetry, simplicity of embellishment, and focus on green space. JG Development’s concept seems to have taken the form of reading that other buildings were also vernacular commercial architecture and then proceeding with disregard verging on disdain for the history and fact of that existing architecture. Some herringbone brick inlaid in the facade of the proposed building is like slapping a bumper sticker on a car and declaring that it changes the make. Mount Horeb also has its own distinct style in the Queen Anne buildings with Norwegian rosemaling decor, such as Open House Imports and houses on Main Street. The design reflects none of these things. 

Speaking of green space, the proposed development has none. This is not merely an aesthetic concern but one of the livability and walkability of Main Street. Given the humidity of the Midwest in summer, we are already prone to heat islands. The greenery on those two lots right now provides areas of high albedo and better air flow to reduce the buildup of heat. A walk down Main Street at noon demonstrates this effect as well as any citations of the science would: the north side is frequently cooler than the south side along that block despite the lack of shade. A zero lot line building with no greenery or awnings would negate that. Additionally, there is no proposed green space anywhere on the complex, neither rooftop gardens nor any sort of additional trees. While there are trees on the sidewalk that would not be destroyed during the construction, it would still be an overall decrease in greenery. The proposed U-shape of the apartments above additionally will look down on blank concrete above the parking lot. That sounds both deeply unappealing to residents as well as a lost opportunity to include greenery. The greenery would also reduce noise pollution from the inevitable HVAC requirements of new construction for so many new residents.

[Village Treasurer] brought up in the meeting, almost jokingly, the concept of turning the U around so the blank space was at the front, and having greenery there. That would be a possible viable option – as would two stories straight up and then a recessed U facing south, with green space on the roof.

If there is concern on JG Development’s part about having that additional weight above the parking structure, I suggest they can look no farther than Epic in Verona, where JP Cullen constructed an 11,000 person auditorium with no internal columns. If they can do that, JG Development can surely put the bulk of their apartments above parking.

A final aspect is their insistence on a lobby that takes up fully half of the first floor, which is supposed to be, per the brief, commercial space. A lobby is not commercial space. On a functional level, my company’s office lobby in Washington, DC is a hallway with a security guard and an elevator. When I was last there in November, it also had a Christmas tree. No one was confused on how to find their way to the office. Moving their lobby to the second floor, I suggest, would not prevent people from finding it. Additionally, they propose to include resident amenities in that space. At this point, I must apologize, because I fear my uncontrollable scoff at this point may have been caught on the meeting recording. JG Development proposed that their oversized and out of brief lobby include the building workout facility for residents, as if this would be an attractive amenity. Even fitness influencers, who are professionally exhibitionist with their workouts, prefer to be able to control the lighting and angles of their displays. Working out visible to all pedestrian traffic passing on Main Street seems like spectacular shortsightedness about the actual needs of residents in addition to taking away from potential actual commercial space. There are three proposed commercial spaces, and they mentioned offering first pick to existing businesses. Given that there are four businesses in the existing spaces, that is obviously insufficient. The entire concept of the lobby space seems poorly conceived as well as counter to the spirit of the development as commercial apartments.

This difficulty with the concept does seem to reflect that JG Development does not seem to be experienced in mixed use development, with their divisions doing commercial and residential renovation and construction so separated as to operate under wholly separate names.

In summary, JG Development’s intransigence over the massive lobby and four stories suggest they are a poor fit for this project. But assuming their requests for more information as to what they could improve were genuine, I hope some of this feedback at least is congruent with the opinions of the planning committee.

Best,

Eileen Young

View approaching the Farmers Market. Nothing really stands out except the water tower and American flag. The proposed building would block the view of the water tower completely.

I used separators rather than the quote format because it is such a huge swathe of text to read. Other concerns that I didn’t end up including in the letter:

  • How the small businesses in the current buildings would be able to survive the construction time (though I did bring it up during my comments)
  • Whether now is a good time to do this given uncertainty about federal tax credits and the economy generally
  • Whether there are any attempts to make it energy efficient or ‘green’ – this one I think is more a personal than general concern, though I don’t think anyone likes excess strain on the electrical grid when our utility workers are already heroes who go out in severe thunderstorms. I think development should think about the future, that progress should be progressive, and that low carbon footprint energy efficient buildings save on heating and cooling bills and are also cool and attractive places to live that would appeal to more potential tenants

But those, I think, are more about any specific plan, and I wanted to focus on the concept overall. As you can read, I still had a lot to say about that.

This is posted here as a durable record, and as a thing I can link in village Facebook groups and hopefully not exceed post length requirements. If you are not in Mount Horeb, please do not contact any of our village board. Get involved in your own planning process. Make your opinions known and try to argue for the community you live in to continue to be the kind of place you moved to on purpose.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Looking at the field of disaster jobs

My proposal is with my advisor. My courses are done, my qualifier passed. So I am now in the phase of my doctoral study known as ABD – all but dissertation. I’m a PhD candidate in Disaster Science and Management, and that means that I have to take a good hard look at the next phase: finding a job after I complete my archival research this semester. A bulleted list is at the bottom, after some musing and disambiguation, but I am looking for a remote job doing research to support disaster policy.

Now to the matter of disambiguating what I’m looking at, because an easy thing to focus on is the ‘Management’ part of the degree. In a small series of interconnected fields, ‘Homeland Security and Emergency Management’ tends to be the umbrella term – it’s definitely the one that tends to show up as available in autocompletes. And to a certain extent that’s obvious and makes sense: the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in the Department of Homeland Security, and most of the relevant policy and action is in the vein of managing responses to emergencies, with additional focus on recovery and sometimes maybe some mitigation (shout-out here to my friend Karen, who started the MS program at the same time as me and has, since graduation, done incredibly cool things at Delaware EMA). But I have leaned hard on the ‘Science’ portion of the degree program.

I completed ICS 100 and ICS 200, and was signed up to take ICS 300 in May 2020 (this was canceled for obvious reasons), but my focus overall has not been on Incident Command Structure or personally implementing it in the field: I prefer looking at patterns and underlying structures and policies. My thesis involved learning to program and then examining social ties and how they impacted evacuation; a recent invited talk revolved around explaining that work to a group of engineers with an eye to how social science can help improve building design requirements and guidelines. This was a fantastic experience, exactly in line with my favorite parts of disaster science.

Fundamentally, I want to solve a problem once and then look at a new problem. The idea of being on the response side of a disaster – of many similar disasters over the course of a career – is soul-crushing. Over the last two years I’ve done some elements of supporting response, rapid data gathering and AARs and helping to assess themes that informed policy as it came out. It became a running theme that if anyone on the broad project needed to know a data point, I likely had it. Everything I touched became a spreadsheet. The high pressure and rapid pace of supporting an active response was fulfilling, but I think a very different set of pressures than those of dealing directly with the public. And that’s what I want in a job.

I also want longevity. I’ve been a freelancer and a contractor, but in the last year, looking at job postings that arrived as part of mailing lists I’m on, I’ve been known to get starry-eyed about things like 401k matching. This leaves me a bit conflicted, because some of my work left me with a dataset that could help inform a curriculum revision project that I know an agency wants to do, and it would be an incredible project that I could write up and propose, and we’d be able to use empirical evidence and data-driven decision-making to improve a whole field!

But also it would inherently be a short-term contract and I’d rather propose a project from a consultancy that, no matter what I was working on, would let me keep medical insurance. So my passion for saving the world, in one of the disciplines where that is most directly a reasonable goal, is significantly tethered to such practicalities as paying the bills. As I’ve said in at least one cover letter at this point: I like novel problems. I like solving them. I like them to be the subject rather than the structure of my work.

And that, combined with a discovery over the last semester and a bit of TAing that, while I’m passionate about mentorship and I care in the abstract about teaching, I’m not passionate about teaching itself, means that I’m not particularly looking in the realm of academia, either.

So where does that leave me? As disasters become more pressing and entities from business to government want to know how to thrive even after this seemingly endless pandemic subsides, I’m highly trained and deeply invested in the field. But Disaster Recovery is sometimes about disasters and sometimes about specific computing failsafe implementation. Many of the job postings forwarded to me as a matter of course are academic or government. And ‘researcher’ is so broad a keyword as to be meaningless, as is ‘analyst.’ Which means that this whole post is a description of what I’m looking for in a job. If you see a posting that you think matches this description, please forward it to me!

In short:

  • Nearly done PhD in Disaster Science and Management
  • Would like a job after, with requirements:
    • Remote, with hybrid a possibility even after the pandemic is over
    • Supporting policy or providing in-depth disaster analysis
    • Consultancy of some kind preferred
  • Job, postings, and relevant keywords to search for all appreciated, in roughly that order
Posted on by Eileen Young

DAY 21 – Final Reflections & Take Action

Apparently almost 8000 people took part in the challenge! There weren’t any readings today, but I took the exit survey, which asked, amongst other things, how comfortable we were having conversations about racial equity both before and after the challenge. I’m a little more comfortable, but I’m still – and maybe even more – aware that I’m white and it’s not necessarily my place to speak when there’s the option of magnifying a Black voice instead.

I think it has made me, though, more willing to step up when I’m with other white people who are saying questionable things. Actually asking the questions they invite is a pretty good option: sometimes people genuinely suck at communication and don’t realize what they’ve implied. Sometimes they know they’re saying racist shit and now don’t have plausible deniability. Questions let you disambiguate and know more about the people you’re talking to! They’re good. They also seem to work best when you approach it as neutrally as possible, remembering that sometimes people don’t think before they speak. Principle of charity + also not letting things go uninterrogated.

I got to use this approach in a different context earlier, with someone talking about art showing Ronald McDonald kissing the Burger King having ‘ruined’ him. I’m living my best life, or something.

But I’m definitely going to be going forward trying to live a more anti-racist life.

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DAY 20 – Black Lives Matter

One of today’s challenges was to listen to the Black Lives Matter playlist on Spotify, which I’ve embedded here because it’s excellent.

Another of the challenges was reading the history of #BlackLivesMatter. I hadn’t known it was woman-founded, nor that it was so deliberate about centering marginalized voices within the Black community, which is pretty cool. It was also the first time I’d seen the store, and I am actually kind of relieved that they don’t have masks with the hashtag. I’d have felt awkward if my Black Lives Matter mask could have supported the organization directly but didn’t.

I also signed up for the website, and am adding them to my donate list for the end of this month.

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DAY 19 – How to be an antiracist

Today’s learning items were mostly videos, which I have a hard time engaging with, so I read the one reading, a short article defining anti-racism. Anti-racism is definitely what we need, though I have some inchoate thoughts about it as an opposite of diversity, and how they’re not necessarily speaking to the same point. But everything is context, and there are so many different contexts in North America that a lot of things fall apart.

But anti-racism is a good place to start. I want to be anti-racist. I have some hesitation, though, about claiming the term, because I see it as involving being more active than I am in working against racism. I can review language in internal documents to try to make sure it’s free of bias, but that’s not the same as ever attending one of the BLM protests that have gone on during the pandemic. But I didn’t attend them because two of the people in my house are asthmatic, and any kind of large gathering of people with no idea of how well social distancing will be maintained has been completely out. So I guess I’ll say I hold anti-racist ideas, ideals, and political positions, but I am not active enough in putting that into action to be an anti-racist. I guess after my bills are paid this month I’ll be donating money to . . . well, my go-tos are the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, but since I’m trying to have more local impact I hit up Charity Navigator. Since POC in Delaware are disproportionately economically disadvantaged and they have a 4 star rating, I guess I’ll be donating to the Food Bank of Delaware.

Today’s action item was to sign up for sessions on how to be antiracist, to be held in October. Which I didn’t, because apparently by the time I got to the link, they were all full. Which is actually pretty cool.

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DAY 18 – Being an ally to POC

The conversations I have about allyship are usually about the LGBT community – the one in which allies definitely belong, because the A stands for lots of things. Allies are important in the LGBT community because it gives space – for friends, for family, for people who aren’t ready to embrace any other label until after their situation has changed, for people with no plan for any other label but a value for equity. For people who vote.

But it’s different for race. Frequently, an LGBT identity is something you can choose to disclose; skin color isn’t. LGBT identity (particularly embracing it) isn’t definitively tied to anything heritable: our intergenerational ties and understandings and paths to self-knowledge are different. So I was really interested in how effective allyship works in a race context, both because of curiosity at the comparisons and because it’s something I want to do.

The reading for today centered on the idea that being an ally means taking up the struggle.

Oh, and the guide is hosted on Github. That’s perfect. The reason it’s perfect: it tracks and attributes contributions, while keeping a record of what’s gone before, how it’s changed, and why. Gits are a good way to make things better, while also keeping track of what didn’t work and why we changed it. Best metaphor/version tracking.

Another of the readings talked about how allyship is about showing up when it’s not trending, about reaching out as people magnifying marginalized voices. It’s also about voting. It’s always about voting.

I sent in my ballot for the primary already, but today’s action item wasn’t about that – it’s to seek out, listen, and build trust with someone you want to be an ally to. Which I need to do. My awkwardness about trying to increase conversations doesn’t trump trying to make very sure they’re included in the community I’ve been working on building for the last few months.