Mention Colorado Springs and you probably think of Pikes Peak, the highest mountain in the southern Front Range of the Rockies, or the Broadmoor Hotel, the historic resort nestled in the hills overlooking the city.
But what happens when you take both of those out of the picture, plus most of the other tourists?
On a recent visit to the Springs in the dead of winter, we discovered the surprising answer. The famous Pikes Peak Cog Railway was closed for the season and the Broadmoor was booked solid, so my kids and I found ourselves an Airbnb in a quiet residential neighborhood near North Cheyenne Cañon Park, and we set out to discover the rest of Colorado Springs.
Turns out there's more -- much more -- to this place than an enormous resort hotel and a mountain. We found miles and miles of impressive hiking trails, a great museum, and one of the most overlooked service academies in America.
Colorado Springs is built around hiking, literally. The city is surrounded by 1,200 acres of open spaces designed to be part of the community. These parks are not the tended gardens you'd expect back East, in New York or Savannah, Ga. They are often swaths of undeveloped land teeming with deer and an occasional black bear.
Our favorite open space was the Garden of the Gods, a National Natural Landmark with miles of hiking trails and 300-foot sandstone formations. On a weekend, you can stroll through here and watch climbers hone their skills on Cathedral Rock's vertical face. The Garden also takes a great picture from almost any angle.
My kids, who grew up mostly on the East Coast, tried to wrap their heads around the fact that this was, in fact, not a wilderness area.
"If this is a park," my 12-year-old son, Iden, asked, "then where's the city?"
Perhaps the best part of Garden of the Gods is that admission is completely free. That's how I like it.
But it's not the only free activity in town. If you like historical museums, you'll love the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, located in the old El Paso County Courthouse. I've seen plenty of other pioneer museums that celebrate a town's historical roots, but this one's a standout. There's a large exhibit with historical photos that includes a section on the history of photography, which carefully explains the various technologies used to capture images. The museum even has a small studio with vintage clothing, where kids can take photos of themselves in pioneer dresses and top hats.
Since it's a former courthouse, the museum also meticulously preserved one of the courtrooms. Alas, part of the room is roped off, but I think my daughter really wanted to slide under the ropes in her borrowed pioneer dress, climb into the judge's seat, and point at random people in the courtroom, shouting, "Guilty!"
Maybe she shouldn't watch so much Law & Order.
And then there's the U.S. Air Force Academy, just outside of town. Spending an afternoon on a college campus might not be your idea of fun, but the Air Force Academy isn't just any any campus. It's one of the finest examples of mid-20th-century Modernist architecture in the United States: a minimal style that uses glass, aluminum and marble.
The centerpiece is the United States Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel, a towering A-frame designed by Chicago architect Walter Netsch. Its bold lines capture the Air Force's forward-looking, innovative culture. It also stands in sharp contrast to the more popular East Coast service academies in Annapolis, Md., and West Point, N.Y., which have longer traditions and more conventional architecture.
There's a helpful visitors center where you can learn more about the institution and watch a short movie about a year in the life of a cadet. After sitting through it, my kids had a very different view of Air Force life and the meaning of leadership. Even if they never serve in the military, they can take some of those academy values home with them -- specifically, the academy's Honor Code, "We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does."
My son asked if the code applied to everyone who visited the academy. I considered my answer for a moment. How long could I persuade him that he had to live by the Honor Code before he found out that it only applied to the cadets? A week? An hour? (And, ahem, wouldn't misleading him technically be a lie?)
"No," I finally sighed. "But it would be nice if it applied to our elected representatives."
Colorado Springs is one of those rare destinations that offers a lot even in the dead of winter and without breaking your budget. All you need is a sturdy pair of hiking boots and a sense of adventure.
Christopher Elliott edits the family adventure travel blog Away is Home. You can follow his adventures on Twitter or Facebook.
Walking past a soggy piece of A4 paper, crumpled among cigarette butts and dog urine at the bottom of a lamp-post, is the closest most people come to any interaction with the British planning system. The nosy might stop to uncurl the wind-battered notice, jot down the reference number and look up the application online, where, once they have navigated pages of documents, they might be lucky enough to download a file that shows what is being proposed – if they can decode architectural drawings, that is.
For those who aren’t prepared to go to such lengths, the first warning that a 40-storey tower is being built at the end of their street often comes in the shape of the tower itself.
The opacity of the planning system has long fostered a destructively combative culture on both sides of the building site fence. Developers go to increasing lengths to obscure the reality of proposals, organising token “consultation” sessions at times when few apart from the retired can attend, and concealing their calculations in pages of viability assessments. Opposition groups, meanwhile, have become ever more militant in their attacks on the developers, staging marches, protests and public meetings with the crazed fervour of a lynch mob.
Communities understandably feel cut out and disenfranchised from the shaping of their cities as the march of luxury flats continues, and developers feel they’re being held over a barrel, forever cast as villains while being forced to contribute to local authority coffers over and above what they deem fair. And with resources stretched to breaking point, councils are resorting to similar measures, as if to say “we’re not guilty, we’re being forced to do it”.
In Hackney, east London, a bold hoarding erected around an estate regeneration project declares: “28 new council homes for social renting, 39 for shared ownership and eight for private sale to help pay for them all in the absence of government funding”.
It is an unprecedented statement for a local authority to make, joined a little further south by another council-sponsored billboard warning of “A dark future for Shoreditch”. With big black and red letters giving it the look of a horror movie poster, it outlines exactly why the borough is opposed to controversial plans to develop the Bishopsgate Goods Yard, which could be the site for a cluster of 12 buildings of up to 47 storeys, where one-bed flats are likely to go for more than £1m.
“We’ve had the decision taken away from us,” proclaims the poster, in reference to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, calling in the project to decide for himself, “but it’s not too late for you to have your say.”
Perhaps people could have had their say a little earlier, rather than the developer wasting millions on professional fees and the council now spending taxpayers’ money on a campaign to stop the project so far down the line – if they had been allowed to have input before the designs were already fixed.
These issues are the nub of a new report produced by the mayor’s Design Advisory Group, an independent body of experts from across the architecture, planning and property sectors, on tackling London’s growth up to 2030 – by which time an extra 1.5 million people will need to have been accommodated in the capital. Unlike the pages of generic platitudes that usually emerge from such groups, Growing London is a breath of fresh air, addressing longstanding flaws in the development system and weaknesses of the London Plan with commonsense recommendations that any new mayor would do well to take up.
The report is ambitiously broad in scope ranging from rethinking density and policy for tall buildings to how suburbia could be intensified, and the need for better understanding of the total lifetime maintenance costs of new buildings. There are good recommendations on breaking up large parcels of publicly owned land into smaller development sites, to give smaller house-builders a look-in, and on encouraging local authorities to share expertise in leading development projects themselves. There is important advice about measuring the qualitative impact of planning policies, given the strange new urban forms often spawned in a developer’s vain effort to tick all the boxes.
The most important thrust of the report, which should be embraced by the next administration, is about finally cracking open the byzantine development process in London, laying it out under the spotlight for all to see. For one thing, it advises that the feeble A4 planning notice should be rethought – perhaps a picture of the proposal might help? – and that it could be linked to a virtual 3D model, so you could see what was being proposed in its wider context. Astonishingly, most planning authorities still don’t have their own in-house virtual models, or request the submission of 3D models with big planning applications, meaning the cumulative impact of neighbouring developments can go critically ignored.
Building on this, the report stresses that public engagement in development needs to become less reactive and move to a much earlier stage in the process: consultation should inform the principles of any development before they are fixed, rather than simply present a finished design to be voted on. It also demands greater transparency and accountability over section 106 agreements, which mitigate impacts of schemes, and the viability appraisals that underpin them, to help reconcile the mismatch between communities’ demands and the reality of what developments can deliver.
If the potential wider benefits of a scheme are spelled out, at least people can judge whether it is in their interests, rather than resorting to a nimby knee-jerk no.
If London’s population is to grow by as much as 100,000 people every year – adding the equivalent of a town the size of Bath on an annual basis – then Londoners have to come to terms with the realities of what that kind of growth means. Opening up the planning process to full scrutiny, with choices presented in a way that people can actually understand and feel part of, is the crucial first step.
The call for submissions is open for the 2023-2024 A’ Design Award & Competition – want to enter? Projects that focus on innovation, technology, design, and creativity are being accepted for consideration until February 28, 2024. You’re invited to take part by entering your best works, projects, and products that have been designed within the last 10 years for a chance at winning the big award. Winners will be announced on April 15, 2024, highlighting the best designers from all countries and across all disciplines. Check out some of the 2022-2023 award winners below for some confidence and creative inspiration.
Kelly Beall is Director of Branded Content at Design Milk. The Pittsburgh-based writer and designer has had a deep love of art and design for as long as she can remember, from Fashion Plates to MoMA and far beyond. When not searching out the visual arts, she's likely sharing her favorite finds with others. Kelly can also be found tracking down new music, teaching herself to play the ukulele, or on the couch with her three pets – Bebe, Rainey, and Remy. Find her @designcrush on social.
The effects of climate change and specifically air pollution are very real and are being harshly felt across the world. Cape Town, South Africa, and many other leading cities around the world have risen to the task of tackling the problem head-on. A key action is our efforts to clamp down on air pollution.
In Cape Town, we are experiencing what scientists call the worst drought in a hundred years due to the effects of climate change.
For this reason, the city of Cape Town is overlaying all the decisions we make on a daily basis by taking the effects of climate change into consideration. It has the ability to compound existing challenges in urban environments.
We cannot plan anything without factoring in climate change.
This is also true in our efforts to ensure generations of Capetonians have access to clean air and other natural resources.
Cities such as Cape Town cannot wait for national governments and large corporations to act. We are responsible for addressing urbanization and ensuring the well-being of our local economies and our residents.
We therefore need to see the opportunities presented by climate change and in specific air pollution and factor it into all the work we do so we can build more resilient cities.
Cape Town’s work to drive down air pollution in our city includes:
Reducing the city’s reliance on coal as a source of energy and favoring renewable energy,
Supporting the installation of grid-tied small-scale embedded generation, particularly in the form of rooftop PV panels,
Investing in monitoring and enforcing air polluters,
Making government buildings more green,
Working with communities to install thermal insulated ceilings and green infrastructure to reduce reliance on open fires and other energy
Educating the next generation about climate change and air pollution,
Working to influence motor vehicle driver behavior to reduce the time cars spend on the road and contribute to air pollution.
Cape Town’s Climate Change Policy focuses on both climate change mitigation and adaptation and aims to address these both in an integrated and innovative way.
Cape Town is a member of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy.
As such, the city is committed to reporting its energy and climate data to the Carbon Disclosure Project annually. In 2016, Cape Town was named one of the top five reporting cities out of the 533 participating cities globally.
Also that year, I was invited to become a member of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate.
Among other things, this initiative has a strong emphasis on encouraging compact, connected and coordinated development, which aligns well with the new strategic priority of the city of working to achieve dense and transit-oriented growth and development.
A key part of our climate change action is our energy goals, which model a more resilient, resource-efficient and equitable future for Cape Town and commit the city to diversifying its energy supply and reducing carbon emissions.
Central to this will be the ability to source 20 percent of Cape Town’s energy from renewable sources by 2020. This requires a significant shift in the city’s approach and control over energy supply sources.
We will no longer merely just be distributors of electricity but we will also generate our own clean energy.
We want Capetonians to have a greater choice over how they consume energy and the price they pay for it.
We have taken South Africa’s national minister of energy to court to fight for our right to purchase renewable energy directly from independent power producers as we are currently not allowed to do this.
We are promoting the responsible installation of grid-tied, small-scale, embedded generation, particularly in the form of rooftop photovoltaic panels.
Cape Town has also made substantial gains in energy efficiency and now, relative to other South African cities, uses significantly less electricity per unit of production and per person.
But it is not just about big plans, the city is taking the lead on the ground.
We have retrofitted thousands of ceilings in poorer households with thermal insulation to improve the air quality and temperatures in these homes, which were built by national government without proper ceilings and insulation giving rise to damp conditions and poor air quality. Due to the city’s retrofitting project, these residents also spend significantly less on electricity to heat or cool their homes, which also assists in reducing emissions.
Our education and awareness projects focus on our next generation of clean air warriors with young preschool and primary school students learning and advocating for clean air.
All 1,500 traffic lights now have efficient LED bulbs and more than 25,000 streetlights have been retrofitted.
Our Air Quality Management Unit is doing crucial work to ensure residents and visitors to Cape Town enjoy the right to clean air.
In the past 12 months, the city tested nearly 8,000 diesel vehicles for dark smoke emissions, with only 68 failures.
Our dedicated Air Quality Practitioners conduct regular inspections to assess and hold industries accountable for their atmospheric emissions.
Cape Town also promotes a tall stack policy for industrial emission sources to reduce the ground level concentration of air pollutants.
The city has a network of 13 ambient air quality monitoring stations to measure ambient air quality. We are building a new air quality monitoring laboratory for our scientific services.
The city has introduced flexi-time and encourages all sectors to enable staff to work from home when possible, to start lift clubs or commute outside peak hours.
Through this we are reducing congestion and the number of private cars on our roads and cutting down on air pollution.
We are also investing in clean transport with the procurement of our first fleet of electric buses for our bus rapid transit system, making us the first city in Africa to use electric vehicles for our public transport system.
Cape Town is drawing advice and best practices from like-minded cities and partners from around the world, Africa and locally to provide the best future for its residents.
We also firmly support American cities for their action in effectively addressing climate change despite President Donald Trump’s stance on this global challenge.
We remain resolute in our commitment to tackle climate change and take bold actions to protect our planet for future generations.
It has been damned as the world’s worst ever restoration, yet another national embarrassment to add to Spain’s inglorious track record of botched conservation projects. The quaintly crumbling ruins of the ninth-century Matrera castle in Cádiz province have been invaded by a white concrete hulk, the precious Moorish stone walls reduced to a thin rind of history, stuck on the front of a big blank box. It is one of the most extreme facadectomies of modern times.
The project has been the subject of derision and disbelief across social media, decried as “absolutely terrible” by national heritage body Hispania Nostra. “No words are needed,” they added, “you just need to look at the photographs.” But look at the photographs and you may well be witnessing a work of accidental genius.
Until local architect Carlos Quevedo got his hands on this protected national monument, in Villamartín, it was just another ruined Andalusian fortress – indistinguishable from those topping practically every hill in the region. Now it has been mutilated into a startling Frankenstein bunker, it has become an international celebrity.
It can also join Spain’s illustrious history of inadvertent masterpieces. When 80-year-old Cecilia Giménez got to work with her pot of paints, the fresco of Jesus in the church of Santuario de la Misericordia, in the small town of Borja, was simply another fresco of Jesus in an unremarkable church. Since her inspired creation of the smeary-faced ape-Christ – instant meme-fodder around the world in 2012 – the village has become a place of pilgrimage, seeing thousands of visitors, a booming novelty T-shirt business and even inspiring a comic opera.
Whether Quevedo’s neo-brutalist insertion has quite the same comic value as the smeary Jesus of Borja remains to be seen, but the architect is adamant his work is in keeping with the original building’s spirit. It is certainly more forbidding than its original creator, the fearsome Christian anti-Umayyad leader, Umar ibn Hafsun, could ever have hoped.
There were three basic aims, Quevedo told the Guardian. “To structurally consolidate those elements that were at risk; to differentiate new additions from the original structure – thus avoiding the imitative reconstructions that are prohibited by law; and to recover the volume, texture and tonality that the tower would originally have had.”
Squint a bit, and you can sort of see what he was trying to do. His approach follows a recent fashion for restoring ruins with blank additions, rebuilding the general volume of what the original structure might have been, but without any of the detail or decoration. The spirit of the original is revived, in its mineral bulk and heft, so the argument goes, but without pretending to construct an exact replica or resorting to shallow pastiche.
Perhaps Quevedo had seen David Chipperfield’s model of his proposal for the 15th-century Castello Sforzesco in Milan, in which he planned to fill in the ruined battlements with a solid mass, devoid of texture or decoration. But maybe he didn’t realise that the stark white blocks in the model were intended to be built in brick and stone, of a tone that chimed with the original – not rendered in white concrete, as he has chosen to do.
The Stirling prize-winning Astley Castle, by Witherford Watson Mann, followed a similar logic, inserting sharp blank walls of brick into the burnt-out ruins of an old manor house. Some heritage purists once again decried what they saw as a blunt and disrespectful intervention, but visit the building and you will find a finely wrought collage of old and new, stitched together with unparalleled sensitivity and care.
One of the precedents for Astley was another project in Spain that was met with equal controversy to the Matrera castle when it was unveiled. The Roman theatre in Sagunto, near Valencia – one of the first structures to be declared a national monument, in 1896 – was radically overhauled in the early 1990s by Italian architects Giorgio Grassi and Manuel Portaceli. They smothered the crumbling stone steps with bright white limestone seats and erected a 25-metre high stage front in brick and stone, ignoring a “stop work” order issued halfway through construction.
One again, locals were outraged at the stark imposition, complaining their views were blocked and that national laws had been flouted. Spain’s 1985 Law of Historical Patrimony spells out that conservation, consolidation and rehabilitation of historical monuments “should avoid all efforts at reconstruction unless parts proven to belong to the original are used”.
“If one extreme is simple conservation, that is, leaving something to die, this is the other extreme,” Grassi conceded when he showed a visitor around the site. “In this case, out of a Roman theatre, we have created a modern and functioning theatre in the style of the ancient Romans.”
Eight years ago, after almost two decades of legal battles, the supreme court ruled the building should returned to its previously ruined state, but it remains defiantly intact – and visited by architects from around the world who shower praise on its bold originality. With Quevedo’s blunt monolith, Spain has added another landmark to its roster of stubborn anti-monuments that may prove enduring – and perhaps, with time, even endearing.
Nestled within the Atlantic Forest on the coast of Serra do Guararu in São Paulo, Brazil, Casa Azul stands as an example of how to build in protected nature without doing it damage. Designed by Studio MK27, this beach house showcases design that respects and celebrates the lush environment it calls home.
At the start, a two-meter protective perimeter was drawn around the Casa Azul’s projected footprint to shield the local forest from any construction. The design had to cooperate with strict parameters set by environmental agencies, ensuring the preservation of the landscape’s integrity. The result? An ingenious architectural solution that’s as much a part of the environment as the trees and coastal breeze.
The house is raised on pilotis giving it the appearance of hovering over the landscape. A massive wooden deck, which seems to be an extension of the surrounding forest, spans beneath the elevated structure. Its organic shape pays homage to the works of landscape architect Roberto Burle-Marx, playing a visual contrast to the sharp lines of the home above. A pool is strategically positioned to partially bask in the sunlight while still maintaining a harmonious relationship with the surrounding landscaping designed by Rodrigo Oliveira.
Two staggered volumes seem to float amid the tree canopy, helping to provide shade and surrounding views. The lower concrete box frames views of nature thanks to both sides of sliding glass walls. With the walls open, the barrier between indoors and out is dissolved creating a large veranda. The upper floor aims to be a sanctuary amidst the treetops, housing rooms wrapped in wooden grid panels (muxarabis) that filter the light.
On the ground level, a rustic stone wall acts both a functional separator and a complement to the supporting pillars.
Casa Azul leans towards minimalism in materials and decor, keeping the focus on its surroundings. Textured concrete and warm woods blend together without creating an overwhelming presence in its environment.
With the glass walls open, the communal living space feels like a treehouse.
Caroline Williamson is Editor-in-Chief of Design Milk. She has a BFA in photography from SCAD and can usually be found searching for vintage wares, doing New York Times crossword puzzles in pen, or reworking playlists on Spotify.
To the residents at 1030 Carroll Street in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, a new bank of Citi Bikes ― the bike sharing program typically found in wealthier neighborhoods ― isn’t a sign that city officials are investing in their health and wellness. Instead, it’s a signal to longtime residents that their area has entered late-stage gentrification.
“As people move out, new people move in and their rents are going sky high,” said Clentine Fenner, 68, who has lived at 1030 Carroll Street since 1976.
Fenner, a retired educator and childcare advocate, has spent the bulk of her adult life in her first floor apartment.
Over the past century, Crown Heights has been a neighborhood that includes communities of Hasidic Jews, African-Americans who migrated from the South and Caribbean immigrants. In the early 2000s, affluent white residents started moving in from Manhattan, attracted by historic brownstones, easy access to the borough’s cultural institutions and subway, and close proximity to the 526-acre Prospect Park.
Fenner appreciates some of the perks that investment in Crown Heights has accrued, like new cafes and restaurants, and trees that the city planted on her block. She’s less enthusiastic about her building’s ongoing construction, noise from which wakes her up early and coats her building’s hallways and stairwells in a fine layer of dust.
When workers were demolishing the unit adjacent to hers to upgrade it with luxury fixtures, Fenner woke up coughing and said she couldn’t get the dusty grit out of her eyes.
“It really had gotten bad,” she said. “But I still refuse to move.”
Fenner wasn’t the only one suffering through construction ― her neighbor Dara Soukamneuth, a 36-year-old freelance art director, had been living at 1030 Carroll for only a few years when her bathroom ceiling collapsed. Management patched the hole, but the new section fell in again less than three months later.
“We formed a tenant union right around when this stuff started happening,” said Soukamneuth, who serves as one of the tenant leaders in her building, a role which includes organizing and flyering before union meetings, rallying her neighbors to call 311 and demanding action from local officials.
After all, it was dangerous: According to the Environmental Protection Agency, homes built before 1970 are likely to have been constructed using asbestos and lead-based paint. Disturbing or removing the original materials without taking proper precautions can result in high concentrations of airborne asbestos and lead dust in the air, which are linked to a range of health problems, including lung cancer and lead poisoning.
There are decades of academic investigation into how gentrification affects housing prices, the economy and crime. But researchers are just beginning to consider how gentrification ― the process by which working class neighborhoods are infiltrated by upwardly mobile newcomers, whose presence prompts rent rises, as well as cultural, social and political changes ― could damage longtime residents’ most fundamental asset: their health.
“Gentrification, as you know, is an important topic in sociology. [But] it’s a very recent development that public health and epidemiology try to look at gentrification as a potential risk factor,” said Sungwoo Lim, a researcher who works for New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
In the 1970s, most public health researchers focused on outreach efforts to curb individual behaviors like diet and exercise. But in the intervening decades, researchers have increasingly focused on the impact of social, political and economic structures on individual health, and investigating policies that help safeguard individual well-being in the face of corporate or political pressures.
In this rethinking, individual health is tied to a system of inequalities that can help inform policy to foster better health for populations.
“The American Public Health Association and other big leaders in health are leading this resurgence [of looking at] the structural pieces,” said Chloe Gurin-Sands, who works at Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council. “Things like your class, economic situation, housing, those underlying pieces of your life, how those are affecting your health.”
Gurin-Sands gave the keynote speech at a Chicago forum called “We Can’t Gentrify Our Way To Health Equity,” during which researchers, community organizers and nonprofit workers explored the link between gentrification and health.
Public health experts are “following that next extension and saying here’s what that means in terms of the real, lived experience and the real health impacts on a family or on a community,” she said.
For longtime residents, gentrification can include many plagues ― such as being forced to live in an active construction zone, stress from landlord pressure to move and make way for higher paying tenants, isolation as newcomers set the culture and tone of your own neighborhood, and dwindling financial resources as the cost of living and housing skyrockets. As neighbors move away and previously vital neighborhood services, such as churches or community centers, relocate, the social networks that provide strength and comfort begin to dwindle as well. All of those realities can have adverse effects on an individual’s health, experts say.
But policymakers can’t address those health problems if they can’t understand or quantify them, and until now, there hasn’t been enough hard research to do that. Beyond academia, there’s little discussion about the health effects of gentrification at all, which disincentivizes politicians from pushing for healthy housing policies that could help keep low-income people affordably housed.
The Ugly Side Of Brooklyn’s Housing Boom
For longtime residents threatened by gentrification, staying in a healthy neighborhood is particularly difficult when trying to fend off a landlord who wants them out.
According to public documents, the owner of 1030 Carroll Street, Ephraim Fruchthandler, bought the building in 2014. Since then, according to architectural plans, as well as multiple visits to the building between October and February, Fruchthandler has been subdividing and renovating the building’s unoccupied units. Then he rents them out at market rate to young professionals, for more than two times what rent-stabilized tenants like Fenner pay for their two-bedroom apartments, according to rental prices advertised on the real estate website StreetEasy.
He’s far from alone, many landlords in gentrifying neighborhoods from Chicago to Los Angeles do the same thing.
Multiple efforts to reach Fruchthandler were unsuccessful, and his office declined numerous requests to comment for this story, but an employee who answered the phone at his offices confirmed that he owned the building.
Fenner can’t afford to leave her rent-stabilized unit, even though she is concerned about her health. If she moved, she said she’d have to leave New York entirely. And although she’s staying put, several of her neighbors who have lived in the building for decades have already departed.
Chasing A Hidden Health Metric
Part of the reason health-focused gentrification research gets short shrift is because it’s difficult to study. Unlike crime or housing research, health data is protected by HIPAA laws, which safeguard Americans by keeping their medical records private, but simultaneously prevent researchers from doing the kind of granular investigations they undertake in other subject areas. Further complicating the matter is that people ― unlike apartments or economies ― physically move, meaning researchers don’t have the luxury of studying change over time unless they hunt down study subjects on an individual basis.
In a recent PubMed database search for gentrification and health studies, more than half of the 43 study results yielded were published in the last three years. The oldest dated back to 2007. A comparable search for gentrification and housing studies on the National Bureau of Economic Research’s database yielded 13,970 results.
This research is challenging, but there are some clever ways of getting around HIPAA. One researcher, Jackelyn Hwang of Stanford University, used credit score data to track residents’ moves out of Philadelphia neighborhoods.
Similar to other structural factors like wealth, education and access to medical care, all of which can boost or diminish health and well-being, neighborhood quality plays an outsized role in residents’ lives and health outcomes.
New York City has grappled with the consequences of gentrification longer than most other American cities, according to Karen Chapple, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, who worked under New York City Mayor David Dinkins in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Starting in 1969, the city reacted to housing crisis pressures by passing strong rent control and rent stabilization laws.
“That has played a powerful role in keeping the core of the city diverse,” Chapple said.
Rent regulation, which limits how much landlords can charge tenants, is a protection that has kept hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers affordably housed. In 2017, there were 840,000 rent-stabilized apartment units in New York City, according to New York City’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal.
By contrast, Chicago, which similarly has valuable housing and a significant number of low-income residents, saw its affordable housing stock legislated away in the 1990s.
Almost half of Chicago residents say they are rent burdened ― spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing ― compared to 31 percent of Americans who are rent burdened overall, according to a 2016 MacArthur survey.
Eviction is an ongoing problem in Chicago, where in 2016, the Circuit Court of Cook County received 24,000 Chicago eviction filings, the majority of which were landlords trying to evict their tenants. Rent regulation in Chicago ― as well as the rest of Illinois ― is illegal, and landlords in effect can evict tenants at their discretion, without being required to explain their reasoning for terminating a lease. And while the number of eviction filings in Chicago has dipped since 2006, experts say that’s not necessarily a sign that the city’s renters are staying housed.
The city dealt low-income Chicagoans another blow when it demolished the notorious Cabrini-Green housing project in the 1990s, which had been home to nearly 15,000 families.
Instead, in the face of rising rents, and with few tenant protections, struggling Chicagoans may be leaving the city altogether. Indeed, the populations of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, on the city’s south and west sides, fell by a combined 50,000 residents between 2010 and 2015, according to census data analyzed by Crain’s.
Another factor that stacks the deck against Chicago renters is the city’s lack of a just cause eviction ordinance that other big cities like New York, Boston and Seattle have, which prevents landlords from arbitrarily evicting tenants. To evict someone in New York City, a landlord must cite one of the city’s specified tenant violations as grounds for eviction, such as failure to pay rent.
From an educational standpoint, there are active and progressive public discussions in Chicago about gentrification and health, like the one Gurin-Sands participated in. In that regard, advocates and residents have a lot of optimism, but when it comes to policy, the city is still playing catch up to New York City.
Still, despite New York’s relatively stronger protections than a city like Chicago, it’s protective rent regulations nonetheless risk being eroded in the face of a booming real estate market.Landlords who own rent-regulated properties spruce up apartment units to attract higher-paying tenants. If they upgrade the unit enough, they can rent it at market rate and make more money. They just have to convince their rent-regulated tenants to leave first.
‘Turn On The Heat On Carroll Street’
Between October and February, tenants at 1030 Carroll street logged nearly 200 complaints about lack of heat in their building, according to Department of Housing Preservation & Development records. In December, they organized an action to protest their lack of heat and hot water in their building, during which tenants, housing organizers and local officials gave megaphone speeches criticizing Fruchthandler and the building’s living conditions. During the protest, an art collective projected slogans like “Heat For The Holidays,” “Baby, It’s Cold Inside” and “Turn On The Heat On Carroll Street,” along with Fruchthandler’s phone number, on the side of the building.
“He has harassed long-term tenants with constant construction that has resulted in frequent debris and pest problems, and has refused to provide basic services like heat and hot water,” said Letitia James, the city’s public advocate, who spoke at the December action and has supported the 1030 tenants in their battle for healthy living conditions since early 2016.
In addition to the heat and hot water complaints, the 1030 Carroll has 74 open violations for offenses such as leaking ceilings, defective smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and peeling lead-based paint. John Sykes and his 16- and 5-year-old daughters live in the fourth floor unit with the overdue lead paint violation.
“The city came in and actually fixed them,” Sykes said of the lead violations, noting that he didn’t blame the landlord for the fact that the prewar building had lead paint in it. “But the same way they are fixing up the new apartments, they could fix up the old ones,” he said.
Lead exposure is harmful at any age, but it’s especially dangerous for kids younger than 6, whose brains are still developing. A child exposed to lead may look healthy, but health problems linked to lead exposure, like brain damage, hearing problems, kidney dysfunction, anemia, headaches, reduced IQ, behavioral issues and seizures, can kick in 5, 10 or 15 years in the future.
“People don’t know to call 311 and ask them to check for lead,” said Sykes, 40, who works for a building management company.
“You have to actually call and request it. It’s not [the city or the landlord that] says, there’s a kid under 6, we should inspect. The only way they go about it is if a parent complains.”
When Gentrification Means An Uptick In Hospital Visits
Being poor is bad for your health, and so is living in a disadvantaged part of town. Babies born in poor neighborhoods are more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards, like lead, mold and rodents, which can lead to chronic disease, learning disabilities and injuries.
Residents in such areas are more likely to be exposed to violence, including gun violence and domestic abuse, which affects life expectancy or can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder.
But being poor in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, or being priced out of such a neighborhood and moving into a poorer one, has its own unique health challenges.
Crown Heights ranks among the fastest changing neighborhoods in New York City. It’s one of eight neighborhoods there that researchers at the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene identified as undergoing a rapid increase in median household income and rent prices, coupled with a spike in residents with college degrees, between 2005 and 2014.
These researchers found that New Yorkers who moved from gentrifying neighborhoods to non-gentrifying, poor neighborhoods, had a bigger rise in hospital visits in the five years after their displacement. Hospital visits among residents who were displaced rose 63.9 percent between 2006 and 2014, compared to 18.7 percent among residents who stayed put.
But the researchers also found that the health impact of gentrification fell heavily on those who managed to stay in their neighborhoods, who saw a parallel, but smaller uptick in ER visits.
The biggest spike in ER visits among displaced residents took place in gentrifying North Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Bushwick, as well as in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Lower East Side.
“Displacement from gentrifying neighborhoods was linked with increased emergency department visits or hospitalizations, in particular due to mental illness,” Lim, the department researcher, explained.
Emergency room visits among displaced residents from Crown Heights, where Fenner lives, shot up more than 60 percent between 2006 and 2014, compared to about a 19 percent increase among residents who stayed in the neighborhood. And across New York City, there’s evidence that displaced residents experience disruptions in their health care access and increased hospitalizations and emergency department visits for mental health.
Ingrid Gould Ellen, the director of the urban planning program at NYU Wagner and a faculty director at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, cautioned against overstating the New York City health department’s findings.
“Everyone in their study is ‘treated’ by gentrification,” said Ellen, who has more than two decades of experience in the field but wasn’t affiliated with the department research. “They focus on comparing outcomes for people who are able to stay in gentrifying neighborhoods with outcomes for those who leave. As [the researchers] acknowledge, they don’t know why some people leave and some people are able to stay in those neighborhoods.”
Like any single study, the new research is better viewed as a foundation for the gentrification and health literature that will be written as the field grows. And although the health department researchers couldn’t prove that gentrification caused displacement in their work, Lim hopes that future researchers will be able prove that link, as well as explain why certain gentrifying neighbors saw bigger hospital visit spikes than others, which his research didn’t explore.
In Housing Court, A David And Goliath Face-Off
New Yorkers who don’t live in rent regulated buildings, or even worse, don’t have leases at all, are beholden to the whims of their landlords, some of whom see a booming real estate market as an excuse to evict existing tenants, raise the rent and turn a bigger profit.
Unexpectedly losing housing is tumultuous for anyone. For a senior citizen on a fixed income or someone who is already combating illness, an eviction can be devastating.
For more than three decades, John Smith, 72, has lived in an apartment in the increasingly gentrified Flatbush neighborhood ofBrooklyn, about 2 miles south of the Carroll Street building. When the lease holder, his roommate Steven Guitano, moved out, Smith continued paying the rent each month, but he was never on the official lease. Because he and Guitano weren’t related, and he couldn’t get in touch with his former roommate after he left, Smith didn’t have much legal recourse when his landlord served him an eviction noticein 2013, according to public records.
Smith went to housing court without legal representation, while his landlord brought multiple lawyers. Smith said they badgered him outside of the courtroom, telling him he didn’t have any right to stay in his apartment.
“Your rent is cheap,” Smith said a lawyer told him, adding, “They paid a lot of money for the building.”
A representative atBrooklyn Equities 11 LLCconfirmed to HuffPost that the management company owns Smith’s building, then hung up. The company did not return subsequent phone calls and voicemails. The law firm that represented the management company in the eviction proceedings declined to comment.
“It was hard. I had prostate cancer and I was being evicted,” Smith said. He said he was going to court for years. “All this is in your mind. You’re trying to deal with your cancer, plus your other problems. I think it could do something physically and mentally to you at the same time.”
In 2013, a year before city council members introduced a bill to establish a tenants’ right to counsel, 99 percent of tenants went to housing court without a lawyer. Today, 73 percent of tenants are unrepresented. In comparison, almost every landlord brings a lawyer to court, according to the city’s Office of Civil Justice. Last summer, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the council bill into law, thus guaranteeing full legal representation to any low-income New Yorker facing eviction, though the policy will take five years to phase in.
While a judge extended Smith’s eviction date several times, he was ultimately forced to vacate his two-bedroom, $987 apartment for good last spring and rented a room in Harlem, where he now lives with strangers.
Smith’s new apartment is closer to Harlem Hospital, where he receives regular prostate cancer treatments, and where he stayed overnight after having surgery on a hernia last year.
But he said the years he spent battling eviction were constant stressors in his life.
“I get a little stressed,” Smith said before his eviction. “I’m not suicidal or nothing like that, but stupid things be pushing in.”
The Ties That Bind ― And Break
Winston and Violet Stiell spent three decades in the same apartment, working in a storefront below the unit, in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, another gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. About a year ago they were evicted and after 60 years of living in New York, Violet fled the city.
“I had a meltdown,” she explained from her new home in a senior living facility in Baltimore, Maryland.
Winston, a craftsman and appliance repairman, moved to East Flatbush, but said he has been “dead broke.” He sold his brightly painted van for less than two hundred dollars. Now he walks everywhere or takes the bus.
The Stiells have long-standing health issues that weren’t caused by gentrification, but the rising cost of living in their gentrifying neighborhood didn’t help.
“If you don’t have your other needs met, it’s a lot harder to keep up with your health,” Gurin-Sands said about the kind of predicament the couple has found themselves in.
Winston said he was diagnosed with diabetes six or seven years ago, and although he has a bad back, which makes bending over difficult, he hasn’t seen a doctor in years. Instead, to ward off anxiety, he carves cow horns into the shape of birds and sells them. But his new apartment doesn’t get the foot traffic that his old studio and workspace in Prospect Lefferts Gardens used to garner, and he’s not selling very many horns these days.
He went to housing court to fight their eviction, but since Winston had a word-of-mouth agreement from his landlord, he couldn’t rally much of a defense. Like Smith, Wintston’s landlord brought a lawyer to court. Stiell represented himself.
“The property was facing foreclosure partly due to Mr. Stiell failing to make rent payments for over two years,” said Jeffrey Homapour, the attorney who represented Stiell’s landlord in housing court. Winston, 75, said he didn’t remember it that way, and that he’d only withheld rent for two or three months.
“Despite the expiration of his lease term and his obligation to vacate the commercial store and apartment, Mr. Stiell refused and dragged out the court process for over six months failing to comply with his court-ordered obligations and ultimately vacating by his own volition,” Homapour said, adding that Stiell had every opportunity to be represented by counsel of his choosing.
“I went to Legal Aid, but they didn’t want to take my case,” Winston said.
“I never got involved with all that stuff,” Violet said. “I have panic attacks. I’m brave, but at a certain point I get terrified.”
The landlord has since renovated the Stiells’ former apartment. When Winston lived there, he said he paid $600 for his non-rent stabilized apartment and $800 for his shop each month. According to rental prices advertised on the realty website Naked Apartments, a one-bedroom apartment in his former building currently rents for $1,800 per month.
“The bottom line is money,” Winston said.
He can’t pay the rent at his current placewithout subletting his second bedroom. This is keeping his wife from returning ― she isn’t interested in moving in with roommates.
“Everybody saying she’s not coming back,” he said. “It seems like I’m the only one who doesn’t know that yet.”
Marriage, arguably the strongest social bond of all, helps to safeguard health, especially for married men, who have more heart health protection, a reduced Alzheimer’s disease risk and better mental health than their unmarried counterparts.
“Displaced persons no longer have access to the same social networks, may lose community ties, and suffer disruptions in regular routines, which increase stress and psychological distress,” the health department researchers wrote in their paper.
A Fight To Stay In The Neighborhood School
If Leticia Trigsted is evicted from her apartment in April, the eviction will be her sixth since 2002, according to public records.
Over two years ago, the 52-year-old moved into her apartment in Irving Park, a gentrifying neighborhood of low-slung, pre-war bungalows on the Northwest side of Chicago, many of which feature wide front lawns.
Trigsted could barely afford housing prices in the area, but felt compelled to stay in the neighborhood she’s lived in for the last decade because of her daughter. Irving Park is safe and clean, with a large Hispanic population and more affordable rent than the city’s lakeside neighborhoods. It’s also close to her teenage daughter’s school. “This is my home,” Trigsted said.
The apartment she found needed some work, but the husband and wife owners promised to fix it up.
Trigsted and her partner did their best to make the apartment livable. They bought a new refrigerator and microwave for their unit and cleaned up the three-story building’s common areas by removing leaves from the backyard and vacuuming the communal stairs. Then last summer, a few months after Trigsted moved in, a crack started on her bathroom ceiling and spread across the room. When her upstairs neighbor washed dishes or used the toilet, water would leak into Trigsted’s kitchen and bathroom.
“Water was running through the cabinets,” she said. Trigsted had placeda bucket next to her stove to catch any errant drips from above. On top of her refrigerator was a jar full of dead flies she’d trapped, an insect infestation she attributed to the ongoing kitchen leak.
When Trigsted’s daughter comes home from school these days, she stays in her room to avoid the smell they attribute to the leak. Standing water such as Trigsted’s leak bucket can quickly become breeding ground for disease-spreading mosquitoes, and for mold, which releases spores into the air that can aggravate respiratory problems.
When the landlord didn’t fix the leak, Trigsted starting calling 311 to report her living conditions, placing three calls to the city in total. Then, in November, Trigsted’s landlord served her a 30-day eviction notice. Trigsted thinks her eviction was retaliation for the 311 calls.
“It doesn’t seem fair. We have to move and he gave us 30 days notice,” Trigsted said. “Why? [The wife] just said that this is her building and she wants me out.”
Luis Molina, Trigsted’s landlord, said her eviction wasn’t related to Trigsted’s calls at all. “I was trying to redo the whole building,” he said. The building is 100 years old and needs plumbing and electrical work done, he stressed, noting that the other tenants are leaving, too.
Molina said that Trigsted was a model tenant. She was clean and paid her rent on time. But Molina was frustrated that Trigsted was fighting her eviction, with help of a Chicago-based tenant collective and an attorney. “She’s being totally unfair,” he said.
In the end, Molina extended Trigsted and her family’s move-out date to the end of April. She won’t have to pay rent during that time. “I’m sure she’s saving [for a new apartment],” Molina said. But after accounting for moving expenses and rising rents in the neighborhood, the money Trigsted will save isn’t likely to go far.
Trigsted looked at an apartment a street away from her current home, but the rent was $1,400 a month, compared to the $1,050 she pays now. In addition to higher rent, the new apartment charges a $300 per month pet fee for every animal that lives on the premises, meaning Trigsted would be paying $600 per month above her base rent if she wants to keep her dog and cat.
“That’s way too much,” said Trigsted, who works in the produce section at a local grocery store. Instead she hopes her son will cosign on a house with her this year. She just has to pay down her credit cards first, she said.
Racial Profiling Fears May Hurt Health
For other long-term residents of gentrifying neighborhoods, gentrification-related stress isn’t about money at all.
Sinaka Garcia, 42, was born in Caledonian Hospital, known today as The Parkside Brooklyn, a luxury building overlooking the southern end of Prospect Park in the Flatbush neighborhood.
Garcia owns a small welding and fabrication business, making custom exhaust systems for high-end cars. He’s also a “black and Hispanic man in Brooklyn,” as he puts it. “Unfortunately, that’s a strike,” he said. “I always feel targeted.”
Despite the fact that crime in his neighborhood, as well as in the city at large, has plummeted since Garcia was a teenager in the 1990s, he said the number of police officers he sees patrolling the neighborhood has ballooned.
As a person of color, he’s apprehensive to get behind the wheel of the high-end cars he works on in the face of increased police presence.
“If a cop gets behind me, or I see a cop on every corner, I’m scared I’m going to get pulled over,” he said. “It’s a terrifying feeling.”
In fact, there’s some evidence to support that even the expectation of a racist encounter, similar to the spike of fear Garcia described while driving, can cause stress hormones to soar.
Garcia also stressed the complexity of neighborhood change ― as a pescatarian of two decades, he said he was happy to have health stores replacing fast food chains. But unlike Garcia, who used to leave the neighborhood to buy healthier food, his neighbors aren’t going to patronize Flatbush’s expensive new restaurants and bars, he explained.
In other words, while in theory an organic corner store might seem to help the neighborhood at large, if onlynewcomers shop there it primarily benefits a fraction of that neighborhood. And as boutique coffee shops and organic corner stores replace affordable supermarkets and laundromats, longtime residents see their neighborhood options shrink.
Garcia lamented the neighborhood’s lack of nutrition education, explaining why residents should pony up for healthier foods at higher prices.
“The government knows when a neighborhood is being gentrified. But instead of putting programs in place, they just come in bulldozing,” he said.
The Grinding Toll Of Landlord Pressure
Displacement isn’t solely the result of evictions and intolerable living conditions. Despite the health risks, for many New Yorkers in gentrifying neighborhoods, landlord pressure to leave is ultimately too exhausting to ward off indefinitely.
“It rises to the level where you can haul them into housing court, but [the landlord] can get an attorney and make all kinds of excuses and he’ll get more time,” said James, the public advocate. “In the meantime, you get frustrated and he offers you $20,000 to leave and you get so frustrated you take it.”
“Each time [the city housing agency] comes by, they give this owner a pass,” complained Fenner, of 1030 Carroll Street.
That’s partially because the lack of heat and disruptive construction are considered middle-grade offenses by the city.
When asked why the violations at 1030 Carroll hadn’t been fixed, despite her advocating for the building for two years, James said that while important, they weren’t “serious enough.”
“Obviously everything is relative,” she said. “They are not life-threatening. They are issues that affect your quality of life, that ultimately affects your life.”
On a crisp February afternoon, Ari Weber showed HuffPost’s reporter around the unit adjacent to Fenner’s apartment. Weber is the CEO of Brookliv, one of several realty companies that serve as a middleman between Fruchthandler, the landlord, and prospective renters for the renovated 1030 Carroll apartment units. He’d never met Fruchthandler personally, one of the more than 300 landlords he works with in the city. Weber said he didn’t know anything about the circumstances of the existing 1030 Carroll tenants.
Weber made headlines last month when he started accepting Bitcoin as a payment option for his Brooklyn rentals, and in the six weeks since then, he said he’s had three prospective tenants who are interested in paying their rent in cryptocurrency.
The first floor hallway of 1030 Carroll had been touched up with fresh paint and the high-shine wood floors gleamed as we entered the renovated unit. As we admired the new luxury fixtures, like a stacked washer and dryer, and private outside space, Weber described the demographics of the tenants he expects will rent the new luxury units. “People like you,” he said, before describing white professionals between the ages of 25 and 34, who want to move to Brooklyn from Manhattan.
When prospective renters go to view Weber’s buildings, they never ask about gentrification directly. Instead they say, “How’s the neighborhood?” by which they mean, “Is it safe?” Weber explained.
“I tell them it’s safe before the words even come out of their mouth.”
Weber grew up in New York and now lives in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. His office sits just across Franklin Avenue from 1030 Carroll Street, and he said the change he’s seen over the last two-and-a-half years in the neighborhood has been dramatic, with a stream of commuters every morning up Franklin Avenue, catching the train into Manhattan for work.
And although Weber is making a name for himself in real estate, it’s not a family business. His own father faced eviction proceedings, before ultimately dropping the case and moving to New Jersey. Despite that personal connection to eviction, however, Weber thinks housing court is unfairly weighted in favor of New York City tenants, who can draw out eviction cases for months because of New York City’s tenant protections.
James, the public advocate, sees the equation differently. “Human and civil rights take a priority over property rights,” she said.
“When you are harming someone, when you are putting their health and their safety in jeopardy, that should trump property rights.”
Additional reporting by Sebastian Murdock.
This story produced as a project for the University of Southern California Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship.
They’re coming for our kettles and they’ve got their eyes on our toasters. Those faceless EU bureaucrats will stop at nothing to see our lawnmowers reined in and our hairdryers tamed, our milk bottles outlawed and our Sunday roasts served undercooked. They even want to make our condoms smaller – but our mighty British manhood will not be constrained!
At the Hunter-welly-wearing core of the Brexit campaign is a fascinating identity crisis centred on the British home. For Brexiters, home is where the idea of nationhood is constructed, the vessel for all the values we hold dearest. And it is this doily-strewn domestic landscape that is now imperilled by a litany of imaginary threats.
When it comes to the ballot box, where the beloved English tradition of the blunt pencil and the rickety foldaway booth awaits in a quaintly tea-stained village hall, the arguments will no longer be about economics or immigration, but square gin bottles and eggs sold by the dozen, red pillar boxes and village fetes, cream teas and the sound of leather on wood. They will be about rewinding to a time before Brussels ever waded in with its newfangled ways.
The Brexit rallying call has become a war cry bellowed from a flimsy stage set of Britishness, by an army whose primary weapon is a poisonous cocktail of nostalgia and fear. And in a surreal turn of events, domestic appliances have found themselves on the frontline of the scaremongering campaign. The twin British traditions of tea and toast are now in the EU’s firing line, we are told, with sinister plans afoot to castrate our kettles and turn down our toasters in a bid to save the environment.
“My toaster takes four attempts before bread goes brown,” tweeted the furious Ukip MEP David Coburn earlier this year. “Many thanks to EU.” He lated added: “My old toaster seemed to be powered by the Torness nuclear reactor ... this one is powered by some kind of EU windmill.”
Coburn’s outpouring came in response to the European Commission’s Ecodesign scheme, an initiative aimed at improving the environmental performance of products sold across the EU. It first introduced a ban on energy inefficient vacuum cleaners in 2014, leading to panic buying of turbo hoovers among the house-proud. It makes the vocal Leave position of our billionaire emperor of domestic suction, James Dyson, all the more fitting.
The extension of the Ecodesign programme to other appliances has now been delayed, after fears it would lend ammunition to the Brexit campaign. But it’s not the first whiff of foreign meddling in the British home to have been taken up and massaged into a shocking scandal by the populist mouthpieces of the Leave lobby.
Twenty-five years of Europhobic rumours, half-truths and lies have been lovingly documented on the Euromyths website, an enthralling window into the paranoiawhipped up by the Daily Mail and the Express. Picture a conservatory, relentlessly battered by assaults on “the British way of life”.
“Now Brussels targets your lawnmower,” screamed one Mail headline in 2014. The truth behind the story was the introduction of new measures to cut toxic emissions from petrol engines, bringing other machines into line with regulations imposed on car engines years ago. “EU allows poisonous mower chemicals to kill our children,” might have been the headline if Brussels hadn’t acted sooner.
Other topics range from binge-drinking to barstaff’s cleavage and barristers’ wigs, those cherished staples of British culture allegedly threatened by EU directives.
“Hands off our barmaids’ boobs,” raged the Sun in 2005, in response to EU rules that require bosses to assess the risk of skin and retina damage for employees who are forced to work in the sun all day. The same paper railed against European Commission research into excessive alcohol consumption among young people and its connection to heart disease, cirrhosis of the liver and drink-driving. The suggestion that barristers stop wearing horse-hair, meanwhile, wasn’t anything to do with the EU at all.
The Euromyths site reads like a Brexit shopping list, running the gamut from double-decker buses to darts in pubs, lamp-posts to lollipop ladies, mince pies to mushy peas. One minute Brussels wants to ban oak trees, the next it wants to rip the Queen’s face from the pages of our passports. Those meddling men in suits want to outlaw saucy seaside postcards and get rid of rocking horses, put an end to thatched roofs and banish miniature steam engines.
It’s not just our image, apparently, but the taste, sound and smell of Britishness that is threatened, too. Those fat cats are intent on attacking all our senses, with measures that will silence our canons and muffle our church bells, as well as prohibit our favourite crisp flavours: prawn cocktail and smoky bacon. The philistines even want to obliterate the fishy smell of Grimsby.
None of the above, if you read the facts behind the outrage, is true. But when did facts ever get in the way of a Eurosceptic headline?
It is a pernicious narrative of nostalgia, ongoing since the very foundation of the European Union, and one that has reached a frothy boil of sentimental nationalism. Leaving the EU won’t miraculously transport us back to the 1950s, nor will it make our toast any browner or our kettles heat faster. It will leave us very much alone, hemmed in by higher hedgerows, drowning our sorrows in a square bottle of gin to the sound of noisy vacuum cleaners.
Launching this week on DESIGNTV is Natural Habitat, a new series from Metropolis that gives insider tours of some of the most beautiful and sustainable homes in the United States. In honor of the launch, we’re thrilled to share their pilot episode filmed in Cold Spring, New York. The video explores the home of Evelyn Carr-White, who enlisted the expertise of River Architects to renovate their original log cabin by modifying the existing structure and expanding it for modern day family life. Following the five Passive House design principles, the designers share how they seamlessly blend modern design with their commitment to preserving the natural environment.
Caroline Williamson is Editor-in-Chief of Design Milk. She has a BFA in photography from SCAD and can usually be found searching for vintage wares, doing New York Times crossword puzzles in pen, or reworking playlists on Spotify.
The Danish lifestyle concept of hygge means many things to many people. But at its core it comes down to an indescribable feeling of comfort. (Think: snuggling on the couch, sipping a hot toddy with the warmth of the fire on your toes.) So as for winter travel accommodations, could there be a greater goal than hygge vibes? Not really. We rounded up nine hotels across the globe currently offering a master class in the Scandinavian art of coziness. Please, do join us in daydreaming about visiting them...
1. Manhausen (Manshausen, Norway)
Adventure-seeking cozy fiends needn’t look further than Manhausen, a 55-acre island escape in Norway’s Grøtøya strait. The retreat’s private “huts” were designed by Norwegian architect Snorre Stinessen to integrate with nature seamlessly and, thus, have the Scandi-chic vibe utterly mastered. Not to be missed: the communal saltwater hot tub overlooking the sea and family-style meals enjoyed fireside at the main house.
For a slice of hygge just outside New York City, consider this completely revamped 1960s ski lodge, which underwent a stunning, Scandinavian-inspired makeover recently. The whitewashed guest rooms now boast layers of warm textiles, personal wood-burning fireplaces and snowy mountain views during the winter months. Word to the wise: Don’t miss the fireside fondue and s’mores kits come après-ski hour.
When it comes to location, it doesn’t get much more hygge than Hotel Budir, a stylish lodge nestled in the remote reaches of Iceland’s western peninsula (but only a couple hours outside Reykjavík). Hole up at the gourmet restaurant for a fine dining experience with 360 views of ancient glaciers as your backdrop and, if you’re lucky, the northern lights.
Fans of high Scandinavian design need to visit this manor turned boutique hotel in Sweden’s capital. Amongst its cozier design accolades, the property boasts a winter conservatory, tiled stoves in several of its guest rooms and a ridiculously chic sitting room with a huge hearth — the perfect spot for enjoying a cup of glogg on a cold evening.
Named after the Finnish word for “home,” this Helsinki hotel is the definition of hygge. Designed for a private-yet-communal experience, it features six timber indoor cottages (designed in minimalist Scandi style), all grouped around a family breakfast table. The thinking here being that the simplicity of cabin living can help us all unwind from daily pressures and responsibilities (even when plopped in the middle of a metropolis).
Behold the tiniest, most adorable hotel we ever did see. It’s tucked into the leaves above a popular café, which means you’ll wake daily to the smell of wafting pastries and good cheer from downstairs. Even cozier than the quarters and postcard setting, you’re just around the corner from Værnedamsvej, fondly known as the “coziest” street in all of Copenhagen and, thus (probably), the world.
Occupying 500 bucolic acres, this turn-of-the-century summer camp now houses a host of luxury, lodge-style cabins. Bike the grounds, paddle the lakes, swim in the outdoor heated pool or head to a nearby mountain for a day of skiing. Then cuddle up with a great book beneath a luxe fur blanket, turn on your fireplace and get your snuggle on.
This Oxfordshire countryside members-only club offers up a distinctly British version of hygge. Among the stunning property’s coziest offerings: the community farmyard, a series of cushy outdoor “living rooms” surrounding fire pits, as well as the Studio Cabin guest room, which boasts views of the lake, a woodburning stove and a private outdoor bathtub. Drool.
For more hygge vibes stateside, head to the tip of Cape Cod. This charming coastal town now boasts a 19th-century-shingled cottage turned hotel with a seriously chic, monk-like sparseness. (Think: whitewashed rooms and nautical curiosities as wall decor.) Book your visit during the quiet, windswept off-season (January through March) for some salty frisk luft (“fresh air”) on the beach, followed by a long, hot soak in your claw-foot tub.