Why Teardowns Hurt Us

"Well they're tearing down the 1950's house I used to live in And building two big houses on the lot And the old town square's transforming and the buildings are five stories I guess commercial development is hot...."

--from "Enough" by Linda Marks

I wrote the song "Enough" (which was released in November 2018 in anticipation of my 2019 In Grace album) in response to the teardown epidemic which is running rampant in Newton, Waltham and many other cities in the greater Boston area. The Newtonville house I practice therapy in located in "teardown central." Just down the street from my house, the Orr Block featured mom and pop businesses so many of us loved, before a commercial developer took over several literal blocks in the town center for a huge teardown project.

Instead of picturesque old buildings with first floor storefronts and a second floor with offices, a gigantic 5 story complex is being constructed. The mom and pop businesses were either forced out of business or displaced. And the cost of both retail and residential space in the new complex, once completed, will be many times the cost in the old buildings.

I was invited to share "Enough" at a meeting of the Ward 6 Democratic Committee in Newton last week, and what I learned about the costs of teardowns both deeply saddened me and sent my head and heart spinning in a kind of psychospiritual crisis.

The costs of the teardown epidemic include:

1. Displacement of current residents

2. Environmental costs of a larger construction footprint

3. A breakdown in the fabric of the existing community

4. Affordability challenges for seniors in the community

Let me address each of these costs:

DISPLACEMENT OF CURRENT RESIDENTS

When people sell their homes to developers, rather than families, the cost of housing in a community is driven up. Developers generally use the formula of 2.5 to 1. This means if they purchase a modest home for $500K, after tearing it down and building a larger home, they plan to sell it for $1.25 million. The kind of person who can afford a $500K home and the kind of person who can afford a $1.25 million home is very different.

Teachers, police officers and firemen who wish to live in the town they work in, human service workers and many other middle class residents cannot afford to purchase another property in a city that is tearing down modest homes and replacing them with much bigger and more expensive homes. This results in displacing middle class residents, who must move to other cities with more affordable housing prices.

ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS OF A LARGER CONSTRUCTION FOOTPRINT

While developers sell teardowns as a way to use more environmentally efficient technologies, the reality is that the new properties are actually costly to the environment in many ways:

1. It takes resources to tear down the old property and dispose of the refuse.

2. Even if there is a more environmentally efficient way to heat a new property, the fact that it is 2.5 to 3 times larger than the more modest property means that it takes much more energy to heat the new property.

3. If takes a lot of energy and environmental resources to make the construction materials used in the new larger home.

4. The new larger home will hold lots of "stuff" (including furniture, fixtures, rugs, other possessions), and it takes energy and resources to make all this "stuff."

When you add up all of these "hidden costs," the reality is that the new larger structure is far more taxing on the environment than the older smaller structure.

A BREAKDOWN IN THE FABRIC OF THE COMMUNITY

A community may have been known for its neighborhoods, including relationships amongst the people who live in the neighborhoods. When developers tear down modest or older homes and build new, larger houses in their place, the people who have comprised the neighborhood, are forced to leave. They can't afford the new homes. And they may want to downsize rather than upsize.

The density of the neighborhood can change if two large houses are built on a lot that once hosted one smaller house. Many of the new properties feature fences, where before there was open space. Fences suggest privacy and "keep away". messages to others in the neighborhood. A city councilor at the meeting I attended noted that many of the newer residents did not really care about the interests of the displaced people in the neighborhood. They were more focused on their own individual lives, with more investment in their own new home than in the history of the neighborhood.

In order to earn the money it takes to buy the expensive new houses, the new residents to the neighborhood very likely need to work long hours at high paying jobs. Even if families move in, the way of life of these contemporary families may be very different than the way of life the families in the pre-teardown neighborhood lived.

AFFORDABILITY CHALLENGES FOR SENIORS IN THE COMMUNITY

I was quite struck by the comments of an 82 year-old man at the meeting I attended. He was living in the house he was born in, having been away for a couple of decades and having returned. As property taxes were climbing, staying in his house was becoming more difficult. Living on a fixed income, there is not the budget space to absorb increasing property taxes and other related costs of home ownership. And yet, if this man were to sell his home, he would not be able to afford a smaller space in the community. Smaller residences are hard to find, and very highly priced. New construction of smaller residences such as condos are premium priced.

Even "affordable housing" that may be included in some of the new big construction projects, is costly. And the other residents must subside the costs with their already high rents. Too, the mix of people in these large new construction complexes may not offer the lifestyle that seniors seek if they wish to downsize.

In the face of all these issues, many seniors feel trapped in their longstanding residences, with increasing costs squeezing them, but nowhere else to go.

I was also struck at how easily pieces of a town's history could be torn down and forgotten. In Newton, the majority of the housing stock was built before the year 2000. And much of it is historical and beautiful. A lot is lost when these homes are torn down. Lots that once included lovely yards and gardens are turned into multi-dwelling structures with high rise homes. Yards are minimal. Sight lines are more limited. Older architectural styles can become extinct.

As more larger structures occupy a fixed amount of land, more people and cars crowd sidewalks and roads. A suburb starts to have a more citified feel. And this is not always good.

The teardown epidemic is very sneaky yet pervasive. In a matter of years, it is possible that all modest homes could be destroyed and replaced. The image of the frogs in a pot of boiling water very much comes to mind.

We need to realize we are in the pot of boiling water, and work together to see if there are ways we can get out before we boil to death. The same goes for the environment and the fabric of our communities.

Why Streaming Hurts Musicians

Imagine that you worked at a job you really loved, that expressed your heart and soul, but was virtually impossible to make a livable wage at...

Pay for this line of work has not only not kept up with inflation over the past 20+ years, but also and even more so, has actually paid less over time, not more. While it was difficult to make a living in this field 20 years ago, it is even harder to do so right now.

It is a profession where people ask you to work for free all the time, telling you they are glad to give you exposure...And it is a profession where there is no reimbursement for travel time or costs, no sick time or vacation time, no reimbursement for hours of preparation, rehearsing and marketing, and little understanding by the public what a reasonable contribution for services might be. Worse of all, the growing online access to products has made production costs impossible to recoup, never mind making a profit.

If you are a professional musician, all of the above is what you face. And to the average listener, it is all invisible. They simply want to enjoy your music, with little or not awareness or even care about how the music industry today impacts you.

Did you know that buying one album from a musician provides more income than 200 hours of streaming?

Did you know that a $20 album purchase earns the same a royalties from 5000 track streams?

These are the hard realities of the music industry today. The economics of being a musician in our streaming age just don't add up. No matter how talented you are, if you are a musician, there is a very high chance that the costs of being a professional musician are higher than the income you can possible generate.

When albums were the primary medium for enjoying music, an artist might invest $5000 to $20,000 in putting together a quality album product, which they could sell to happy fans at shows for $20 each. With that economic model, it took 250 to 1000 albums sold to cover product costs. If an album made a run of 1000 albums, for an album that cost $5000 to $10,000 to make, there was a chance of earning back the money so it could be funneled forward into another recording project. And for an album in this cost range, there was a chance to make a profit once the first 250 to 500 albums were sold.

Today, almost no one buys physical albums, In fact, many people, especially in the younger generations, lack a CD player or mechanism to play a physical album. Ironically, the people most likely to want physical albums are other musicians, who understand the treasure they are holding in their hands.

To take this further the $5000 to $20,000 a musician invests in producing a quality album only includes a long list of recording costs (studio time, sound engineer's time, recoding, editing, mixing, mastering, hiring other musicians to play on the album, writing and making charts for songs on the album, licensing fees for covers, registration of songs/album with Library of Congress, design of album artwork, physical reproduction of CD's and distribution channel costs). A huge, unaccounted for cost is the musician's time.

If I spend 8 hours per week working on the creative part of making an album (writing, arranging, recording, studio time editing with the sound engineer, working on album art concepts) and it takes me one year to complete an album, that means I will have invested 400+ unpaid hours on top of the expenses associated with recording and producing an album--physical or even virtual. That is a lot of unpaid time.

Then there is all the time it takes to market and promote an album. Reaching out to media, venues, reviewers and building relationships over time so that your music is visible takes countless more unpaid hours.

To be a musician today, requires having two full-time jobs: one to earn enough money to take care of yourself and survive so you can be a musician, and one that pays so little it is painful, even though it is who you are: being a musician.

It has never been easy to be a musician. It is just much harder now that it ever has been during the course of my adult life. And the growth of the streaming industry, which has made music and musicians nothing more than a commodity people feel entitled to have for free, has created an impossible economic model for musicians.

If a person works for Whole Foods, they are paid a minimum of $15 per hour, with benefits. If you add up all the hours a musician invests in all facets of their professional career, the return on their investment sadly is almost as minuscule as the payment they get from streaming their music.

Next time you go to a show, support your local musician. Put a $20 bill (not a $1 bill) in their tip jar. And buy their album. If you can play a physical CD, you will enjoy the album concert and all the care that went intro creating the album, something that eludes the streaming listener who picks one song from a playlist. And even if you can't play a physical CD, consider it a work of art you can treasure.

At The Root Of What Matters

English is an interesting language, in which some words have double entendres which are actually inter-related. For example, my colleague Aron Gersh wrote about, when we say "I feel deeply touched inside," the word touched has both an emotional and physical meaning. It may be the way you touch me "outside" on my skin, that reaches my heart, creating a feeling of being emotionally touched. Or if you touch me emotionally, I may be more open to letting you touch me "physically."

The word "matter" is another one of those words. When we say something "matters" to us, we are talking about an emotional meaning. What "matters" is important to us, and occupies space in the heart. And "matter" is also a term relating to objects or forms we find in the physical world. We make jokes about the brain as "gray matter." Or we can look at physical substances through the eyes of a physicist (who will focus on how matter occupies space and possesses mass as distinct from energy).

And to further this line of inquiry, the relationship between what emotionally matters and physical matter is actually quite significant too: what matters to us informs where we need to direct our energy in an actionable way to create what we want in our lives. This includes forms of matter, like house, or cars, or people we want to meet. Bottom line: what matters to us really matters.

When we direct our energy without considering what really matters, we can be creative. But we may not be happy with what we end up creating. Learning how to identify what really matters, and let ourselves accept or embrace what really matters is often an introspective journey which requires guidance and work. Learning what really matters requires learning to listen to the heart, and identify the heart's priorities and values. When we direct our energy in alignment with your heart's priorities and values, we are able to manifest things that we really care about.

When we create things we really care about, we feel our efforts are purposeful and the results are more likely to make us happy. We can create from the soul level up, from the inside out. We create things that fit and resonate and feel right. When we create what we think we "should" create or feel pressured to create by outside forces without consideration for whether it really fits our inner priorities and values, we are more likely to feel stress and pressure, rather than flow and happiness.

The heart has the strongest electromagnetic field in the body, so harnessing this energy and directing it towards a goal that matters, feels powerful and often leaves us feeling empowered. What we create may also benefit other people, and leave them feeling empowered as well.

When we get to "the heart of the matter," we are also getting to the root of what matters. This root anchors our actions. And our actions are anchored in the heart. In essence we become practical physicists, translating energy into matter through our actions. This is where science and spirituality meet, and vision and reality can meet. This is where life can feel magical and fun as well as meaningful and significant.

Being able to get to the heart of the matter, to really know what matters and to take action based on what really matters creates more of what really matters in both our emotional and physical world.

Divine Timing

When I was a little girl, I remember hearing Jiminy Crickett sing the song,"When You Wish Upon A Star" in the movie Pinocchio.

Its lyrics tapped into what I eventually called "living with vision," letting our hearts be a compass to guide us towards our deepest dreams.

"When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires will come to you."

Often, when we look into our hearts and see our deepest wishes, we want them to happen immediately. But life doesn't always work that way. Life has a natural rhythm, and while our wishes and desires might not come to us as soon as we want them to, when we really open our hearts to them, they most often do become real in divine timing.

Like a bolt out of the blue.
Fate steps in and see you through.
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true.

This brings in the importance of faith. Faith is a very powerful force. It allows us to keep our heart open to our dreams even when we don't know exactly how or when our dreams will come to be. In this sense, faith is the guardian and keeper of our heartfelt dreams. And faith allows us to let go of the need to control timing, so that we may surrender into the path that diving timing carves out for us.

Faith gives us a spaciousness and a sense of grace, that allows us to be present in the moment, and see what unfolds. This allows us to take right action moment to moment and experience the gift of the journey as well as the gift of arriving at our goal.

Have you ever had the experience of leaving your house a few minutes late to go to a coffeeshop or a supermarket and running into an old friend you had not seen for a while when you arrived? Or have you walked in the door, having thought about someone, only to find a message from them in your e-mail or a text arriving as you open the door? This is divine timing in action. At times when this kind of synchronicity would happen, I would find myself asking, "so what would have happened if I had not left late?" or "did the fact that I was thinking of this person lead to their calling?"

Experiences like these remind us that we are all interconnected. Our thoughts, our feelings, our deepest desires are energy currents, and they communicate, even in ways we cannot grasp with our physical senses. If we can have faith in the universal currents that run through life overall, as well as our own lives, it is easier to embrace and be embraced by divine timing.

I have found that the more deeply I understood the process of living with vision: opening my heart to my deepest dreams and desires, finding strength in the faith that in divine time my vision would become real, and gracefully taking needed steps towards the vision as they become clear, the more peacefully I live.

Experiences of divine timing lead to an understanding that we will really be okay if we stay connected to our hearts and let go of control. It is a truly beautiful and inspiring experience to realize we can ride the energy currents of life, and things will really move forward in ways that matter to us."

At the Heart of the Money Matter

Money is the commonly accepted measure of material value, but what does it really mean to us? That is a question I explored in an article I wrote for a British psychology magazine 30 years ago, "Money Is A Mirror: How Much Is Enough?"

Do you know anyone that is totally comfortable with their relationship with money? Money is one of our culture's most emotionally loaded concepts: it is a metaphor for all our worst fears, our highest expectations and those parts of our lives we can and cannot control. Wealthy, poor or making ends meet, rarely is anyone satisfied with their financial position.

Many people spend years trying to come to peace with money and that peace is hard to come by. In a culture obsessed with money, most of us don't have an answer to the question "how much is enough?" Some of the reasons it is so hard to answer this questions are:

1. Many of us don't know what matters most to us at the heart of the matter. What makes you happy? What brings you joy and contentment? We are bombarded with marketing messages telling us what we should have and all the new products and services that are "out there." One small problem: what we think we SHOULD have, may not be what makes us happy.

2. "Enoughness" follows from living purposefully. Many of us struggle with what brings us meaning and purpose. If we do what others tell us or define ourselves from the outside in rather than the inside out, both purpose and "enoughness" are hard to find.

3. Defining enough requires both a spiritual grounding to identify what really matters and the ability to translate the actual cost of what matters into financial terms.

Psychologically and culturally, we have projected onto money our most basic needs, our deepest fears and elusive things we hunger for. This is what I. mean when I say "money is a mirror."

Here are some examples:

1. Money is power. It comes with the ability to influence other people. How people hold and use their power varies. Some use money to serve. Others use money to manipulate.

2. Money is safety and security. It enables people to meet their basic needs for survival: food, shelter and protection. It can also bring us the ability to access resources that can keep us safe and secure.

3. Money separates people. Defining people by how much money they have, "the haves" and "have nots" or the "upper class," "middle class" or "lower class," is a common cultural practice. Neighborhoods often reflect the financial common ground of a particular group of people. Renting an apartment in a multi-family home suggests a different social subgroup than living in a gated community of homeowners. Disagreements over money can cause rifts in families. Long standing friendships can be thrown into question when the financial position of one friend greatly changes, but not the other.

4. Money is all the things we want in our heart of hearts. This includes freedom, happiness, peace and love.

5. Money is a responsibility and for some a burden. Managing money takes a lot of time and energy.

6. Money creates opportunity. Money can enable possibility. Money can open doors.

7. Money is acknowledgement. Money is often a reward for our labors. Sadly, different professional areas are valued financially very differently. Someone who works on Wall Street makes far more money than a grammar school teacher. The professions that are most highly paid are not always the ones that make the greatest contribution to society.

How much is enough?

The key issue with money is not how much you have but how you hold what you have. Getting caught in the cycle of "I never have enough" creates a trap which impedes the quality of life. I like to answer the question "how much is enough?" by saying "whatever I need to do the things I really care about." The answer is different for every person. Someone who enjoys living in the country might need a very different amount than someone who really loves living in the heart of the city. If someone is single and unattached, their needs are very different than if they have children. At different times in outlives, we may answer the question differently.

Learning to know ourselves is both an introspective process, and sometimes a process of trying out something that interests us and seeing if the experience increases or decreases of sense of interest. We need to look to our hearts as well as our minds to find answers. Learning to become honest with oneself takes time and courage.

I believe it is also important to look at our wants and needs in the context of others and their needs. If we are afraid of life and do not trust we will find what we need, we might hold onto money and things tightly. We may find ourselves building fortresses and cushions of protection so we don't end up left in the lurch. In doing so, we may be taking more than our share out of fear. This behavior can become a cycle of stuckiness built on feelings of "I'll never have enough."

In our culture today, we have too many examples of people who are ruled by greed with little conscience. The media is full of stories and images of people who lie, break the law and do whatever they want with little care for the consequence of their actions. There is a very high spiritual cost to living this way. And it breaks down the fabric of community and interconnection that is so important for all of us to have what we really need.

Developing a healthy sense of "enough," while also incorporating a sense of social consciousness, is far more likely to lead to peace than living from a place of fear or great. Gratitude and appreciation feed the spirit and often generate more of the things we really want and need.

Becoming grounded about your financial needs, your financial resources and your financial habits is also a key part of the money equation. How often do you spend money without tracking what you've spent or if you have enough for all your basic needs if you make a spending decision? Are you afraid to add up your expenses for fear of what the number might be? These kinds of habits leave us ungrounded. Keeping a money log where you track what you spend, and what you have to spend allows you to compare income and outflow consciously. It helps ground your money choices in money reality and lets you truly take care of yourself.

The Importance of Giving Thanks

On Thanksgiving evening, I am taking some quiet space to reflect with gratitude of the many good things in my life. I have always loved having a holiday that invites the opportunity to to meditate, take stock of what is good and right and give appreciation and thanks.

Our world moves so fast. Things change in the blink of an eye. Technology is a blessing and a curse. It is so easy to see the glass as half empty. Especially when we feel more isolated, disconnected or overwhelmed.

Giving thanks is a way of finding the ways the glass is half full or more than half full. Whatever we focus on grows. So, if we take the time to reflect on what is good in our lives, to appreciate the people, the creatures and the surroundings that support us, our sense of goodness expands.

Appreciation is good for the heart and soul. It is a kind of spiritual fertilizer. It helps good feelings grow within us, and it helps good feelings grow in the others we care about. Giving thanks and appreciation invites us to slow down, to be present in the moment, to breathe, to feel and to introspect. Once we have taken the time to introspect, giving thanks invites us to express what we have come to appreciate to our friends, family, colleagues and larger community.

Appreciation nurtures good will, which is another magic spiritual force. Good will invites collaboration. Good will invites generosity and kindness. Good will invites qualities of the heart, which make each moment more enjoyable and fulfilling. Good will helps make projects more possible and visions more realizable.

Giving thanks is also good self-care. It is a way of being kind to ourselves. It is a way to really savor what we love, what is important and what might be too easy to take for granted if we don't slow down and take stock.

When I sit with a group of people who together slow down, meditate and focus on what they have to be grateful for, I often hear realizations that many of the things that cause worry and anxiety are first world problems. Most of the people in my world have food, clothing and shelter. Most people in my world really do have enough. When we look at the people in CA whose homes and lives have been decimated by out of control fires, or even more locally at the people displaced by the Columbia Gas Explosions, the gift of having a safe, warm home becomes very clear.

Giving thanks for health, for creative pursuits, for having enough enrich our spirits and our lives. If we use the critical mind to find fault, we can always generate a laundry list of issues. Joining the mind, heart and spirit in listing what is good will feed the soul and help us find peace in the moment and over time as well.

The Deep and the Shallow

I recently saw the new version of "A Star Is Born," the collaborative project of Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. I was struck by the emotional power of many of the songs, particularly the way they were woven into the story line, and the visual images that accompanied their performance. Lady Gaga is a very evocative singer, so her singing made many of the songs truly heart rendering.

A song from the movie which I suspect may be nominated for an Academy Award is "Shallow." And the very fact that "shallow" became a song title first called my attention. So much of the way the modern world is presented to us is just that, shallow. And as a former wise woman I knew once said to me, "A large percentage of people are hopelessly asleep, never to be awakened. Some open their eyes for a moments and go back to sleep. Others are dozing. And very few are consciously awake, diving into the depths of life, with all the emotional reverberations it brings."

I was talking with one of my friends from college the other night, and we found ourselves talking about how special it was to find people who chose to explore the depths of their experience and who enjoyed talking about their emotional depths--thoughts, feelings and experiences, freely and openly. For many it is just too scary to "jump off the deep end" and move beyond the shallow. We are not taught how to be grounded, to live in our bodies, to create the internal space we need to feel and experience all of our feelings fully. We are even taught that some feelings are "good" and others are "bad" or "negative" which often interferes with having the emotional space to just presence and experience our feelings.

Our schools would serve not only children but also future generations and society as a whole if we valued emotional literacy enough to teach as a subject from kindergarten on. Learning the skills to introspect, to breath into feelings so that we create the internal space to feel them, to learn what it means to live in the body and be grounded and to develop an observer or witness part in our consciousness that would help us be with whatever arises without judgment would greatly improve the quality of life for all.

In a culture that stays on the shallow side lines, people seek superficial rewards and crave meaning and purpose. It takes the courage to dive into the depths beyond the shallow to find these kinds of soul deep rewards. Love is often portrayed as a gateway beyond the shallow into the depths, much like Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga sing about. But we need skills to navigate the depths, like emotional deep sea divers, if we are going to be able to ride the waves of life and time in the depths. Many of the images of love that are portrayed in the media are much more shallow. Men and women are objectified based on the looks or income. Everything is supposed to have the magic and ease of new relationship energy. But deeper relationships hit the shadows that inevitable arise within us as life takes its course.

Emotional literacy can help us know ourselves and be available to know the depths in others. We can build the emotional muscles and the communication skills it takes to dive into the depths and relax in the shallow when consciously desired. Having the skills and the emotional space to swim between deep and shallow help us learn to be balanced internally and with others in relationship.