On a smaller note, something about the utilities’ storm response in my neighborhood struck a nerve. Whenever I’ve spoken with anyone from any of the utilities, they’ve eventually come around to the same issue: Trees. Almost to a person, every customer service rep, lineman, or technician has pointed out that we have a lot of old trees in this neighborhood, as if this explains why our services are being restored more slowly here than in some neighboring areas. Seriously? So, now the trees are to blame for utility companies’ logistical problems? Just out of curiosity, I compared the outage rates that PSE&G was reporting several days after the storm in two neighboring municipalities: West Orange (where I live, and where most wires are overhead), and East Orange (which is an older city, where most of the utility lines have been buried for over a hundred years). The difference was striking:

Municipality                             Total Customers    Customers Out     Percent Out
ESSEX – EAST ORANGE CITY         30,403                 6,525                21.5%
ESSEX – WEST ORANGE TWP        19,970               11,078                55.5%
Source: Public Service Electric & Gas.

It’s a classic natural experiment, where a sudden event subjects two different scenarios to a comparable set of circumstances, with observable differences between the results. It’s no secret that suburban neighborhoods lose power more frequently, and for longer periods, after storms. And, of course, with a storm of Sandy’s magnitude, one would expect outages to be longer and more widespread. But stop blaming the trees. East Orange has plenty of old trees, too. It also, quite frankly, has a poorer population that enjoys less political clout — leading to an older infrastructure, fewer political favors in a time of crisis, and whatever other indignities such a disadvantage might entail. Yet two days after the storm, the percentage of East Orange households in the dark was approximately one-third of the percentage in suburban West Orange.

Yes, we do have a lot of old trees in this neighborhood. We’re very fortunate, and for the most part they’re great to have around, but sometimes they do come down when there’s a storm. But there’s a practice that’s worked for more than a hundred years to mitigate the effects of storm damage on utilities that transmit by wire: burying the lines. The practice also has the added benefit of creating more attractive neighborhoods by removing one of the most ubiquitous eyesores of the postwar American landscape. It’s not a perfect solution, and in flood zones, it might even do more harm than good. But, in light of the growing frequency of severe weather events, the time has come to start making this investment, again, in the places where doing so would be most effective.

The utilities don’t want to spend the money, and they’ve avoided doing so for a long time. Going forward, that has to change.

It’s funny how unaware one can be of his dependence on modernity until a ten-day stretch without power comes along. Fortunately, aside from the epic utility interruptions, there was no trouble at the house. Nearby, things weren’t so lucky. This was the scene at a neighbor’s place after the storm:

Note that this picture was taken after a hundred-year-old tree had been removed from the roof. Here’s a shot of another tree that came down in the same vicinity:

So, the effects of Sandy were fairly bad in this part of Essex County. We have an elevation of about 500 feet a.s.l., and we’re situated on the first ridge of mountains that runs behind the coastal plain– so we took a direct blow from the high winds that came in off the ocean. But the impact here was still mild compared to what happened in low-lying areas of the region: There was no flooding here.

We had no idea, initially, how extensive the damage had been to the entire utility system. There wasn’t much specific communication from PSE&G, Verizon, or Comcast. In the end, it took ten full days to have our electricity restored — almost to the minute. To this day — 23 days after the storm — cable television has still not been restored. Go Comcast! No one in this cluster of houses uses a landline, so who knows what happened with those?

In light of recent developments, I have stopped posting links to articles at the WSJ, or at any other News Corporation media outlet.  This change is being made for obvious reasons, and until further notice.

I strongly encourage other writers to make the same decision.

New Jersey 1884.

New Jersey Future presents a concise digest of a sobering new report by researchers at Rowan University, concerning the land use patterns of New Jersey since 1970.  The report finds modest support for a positive impact from the Mount Laurel doctrine, but an overall increase in both exclusionary zoning policies and inefficient land use patterns.  The report also finds a growing separation between the locations of housing and employment opportunities in Monmouth and Somerset, a trend that foreshadows more wasted resources and greater traffic congestion.  This is not how the state should be developed.

For the last generation, Mexican migration to the United States has been one of the strongest factors driving neighborhood change, labor markets, and housing demand in American cities from California to New Jersey.  Now the Times has a report, riffing off of research by Princeton’s Douglas Massey, that suggests that the long era characterized by heavy migration from Mexico may be coming to a close.  If the trend is real, it will be interesting to examine how U.S. urban development is influenced by this change over the next several years.

The NYT has a lighthearted story by Sam Roberts about an abandoned railroad track right-of-way in Brooklyn.  Neighbors have enclosed and taken possession of the strip of land for their own ordinary purposes.  Reading the article led me to do some quick research: It turns out that, in 2008, the New York legislature enacted a statutory revision that seems to complicate what otherwise could have been the neighbors’ textbook common law adverse possession claim.

R.P.A.P. §§ 501(2), et seq., now states:

2.  Acquisition of title. An adverse possessor gains title to the occupied real property upon the expiration of the statute of limitations for an action to recover real property pursuant to subdivision (a) of section two hundred twelve of the civil practice law and rules, provided that the occupancy, as described in sections five hundred twelve and five hundred twenty-two of this article, has been adverse, under claim of right, open and notorious, continuous, exclusive, and actual.

3.  Claim of right.  A claim of right means a reasonable basis for the belief that the property belongs to the adverse possessor or property owner, as the case may be. Notwithstanding any other provision of this article, claim of right shall not be required if the owner or owners of the real property throughout the statutory period cannot be  ascertained in  the records  of the county clerk, or the register of the county, of the county where such real property is situated, and located by reasonable means.

(Emphasis added.)

What strikes me as interesting, and discordant, about this statutory revision is a statement made by its main sponsor, Elizabeth Little, a Republican state senator from the North Country.  In a 2008 memorandum, quoted by Law of the Land, Senator Little wrote:

[If adverse possession claimants] have a reasonable basis to believe that it is their land then that is exactly the good faith dispute over title to real property for which the adverse possession doctrine was established.  Adverse possession should be used to settle good faith disputes over who owns land.

This strikes me as a very inaccurate statement of the principles that underpin the doctrine.  Adverse possession might occasionally come into play to settle such matters, but ordinary boundary and title disputes are readily addressed with other areas of the common law of property.  Adverse possession, in a common analysis, is a teaching that was traditionally aimed at keeping fallow land from being tied up, in perpetuity, by individuals who not only did not make use of the land, but whose relationship with the land had become so tenuous that they’d failed to even object to its use by an uninvited party for an entire seven-year vesting period.  That is to say, adverse possession is a traditional, common law incentive that works to encourage individuals to make use of abandoned property.  It is a doctrine that values the sweat equity of those who would work the land more than it values the paper titles of those who would let it lie fallow.  And it is a device for preventing the perpetual entrenchment of nonproductive, landed wealth.  Put simply by Justice O.W. Holmes:

Sometimes it is said that, if a man neglects to enforce his rights, he cannot complain if, after a while, the law follows his example.

That said, an adverse possessor has always assumed the risk that his bluff would be called before the vesting period had run.  But once such time had expired without an objection by the title-holder of record, the adverse possessor could expect to have a solid legal claim to the property.  The Metropolitan Transit Authority, as its role is described in the NYT story, is exactly the sort of owner against whom adverse possession ought to work.  The MTA, and its predecessors in title, have been absentee holders that have not exercised any incidents of ownership over the land at issue since, apparently, 1924.  In the mean time, the parcel’s immediate neighbors have made productive use of the abandoned property.  During this time, the neighbors’ use has never elicited any objection from the MTA or its predecessors in title.

Under Senator Little’s amendment to New York’s adverse possession statute, it appears that the MTA could maintain a live claim to the land, against the neighbors, in spite of its nearly nine decades of neglecting the property.  Simply stated, this is not right; the common law approach is.

A Google satellite map of the block at issue (East 18th Street between Avenues U and V) is here:

A couple of relevant land-use stories have appeared in the WSJ recently.  Speakeasy has an interview with Justin Martin, author of a new book, Genius of Place, about the life and work of Frederick Law Olmsted.  Also, the straight news section has a piece about a recent uptick in approval numbers for apartment proposals in the suburbs of Long Island, New York.

Jedediah Drolet, a fellow Blousteiner, has spent a good deal of time at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, one of the most significant U.S. sites of the Ancient Pueblo Peoples.  He is also the author of Gambler’s House, a blog which examines the land use, archaeology, and cultural history of Chaco Canyon and surrounding parts of the American Southwest.  Jed’s combination of personal experience and currency with ongoing scholarly research gives his blog a unique perspective.  It’s well worth a read.

A new course, recorded last spring, is now posted: John Wargo’s Environmental Politics and Law.  I watched one lecture about LEED certification and some of its drawbacks (#21) and another that looks back over four decades of public lands management in New York’s Adirondack Park (#18).  Both were good.

Other free courses are listed here.  Highly recommended: Diana Kleiner’s lectures about Roman architecture.

Source: City of Dallas, TX.

A grad school friend, Justin Tirsun, is working on a compelling and beautifully detailed urban design and land use analysis for the City of Dallas, Texas.  The project focuses on documenting the elements that distinguish the city’s rich variety of neighborhoods.  Fittingly, it appears to be co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Check it out.