Pandemic Link Dump

Passing along a handful of random articles and topics I've come across over the last month or so...

Urban freeways are a product of racial injustice, and its effects are still being felt here in Houston.  I've touched on this before, and in the wake of the protests for racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd, it's become a topic once again. Urban freeways were largely built through minority neighborhoods, dividing and displacing their inhabitants. Decades later, those scars remain:

Thousands of peaceful protesters in the Twin Cities occupied Interstate 94 over the weekend as they marched from the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul to Minneapolis. 

For the region’s African-American community, which has been leading the ongoing protests over the fatal arrest of George Floyd and the use of police force on black Americans, the concrete they were standing on bears significant meaning. 

It was this highway that, in the 1950s and ‘60s, tore apart the once-thriving neighborhood of Rondo — the heart of St. Paul’s largest African-American community — and helped spur decades of racial segregation in the region. 

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz acknowledged as much during a Saturday press conference. "It wasn’t just physical — it ripped a culture, it ripped who we were. It was an indiscriminate act that said this community doesn’t matter, it’s invisible,” he said. “This convenient place to put a highway so we can cross over this place and go from the city out to the suburbs.”

The once and future effects of these freeways remain a topic of controversy today, even here in Houston as TxDOT continues forward in it plan to reconstruct IH-45 north:

Members of the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s transportation advisory committee this week voted to keep portions of the I-45 project in the area’s short-term transportation plan, but with a host of caveats. Chief among those conditions is that the Texas Department of Transportation respond in detail to a set of requests from Houston planners outlining exactly what they can and cannot do to stay within the freeway’s existing boundary and agree in writing to protect displaced residents and businesses. 

The lack of clear commitments worries skeptics, who fear neighborhoods affected by the massive redesign from downtown north to Beltway 8, such as Northside, Independence Heights and Fifth Ward, will continue to bear the brunt of TxDOT and Houston’s highway expansion. For decades, neighborhoods along I-45, I-69 and I-10 north and east of downtown have felt the effects of living within shouting distance of the freeways, as mostly white officials routed the thoroughfares through black and Hispanic communities. 

“A vote on this project that continues those very systems of oppression, disparity and racial inequities without addressing the real problems is only supporting and continuing that system of racism,” said Oni Blair, a member of the transportation advisory committee and executive director of LINK Houston, an advocacy group that has organized opposition to the I-45 plan.

The IH-45 north rebuild provides an opportunity to improve the freeway while at the same time address the impacts that the freeway has historically had on adjacent communities. TxDOT needs to listen carefully, and not repeat the mistakes of the past:

“To leave I-45 as it is currently configured would be a mistake,” said Carol Lewis, director of Texas Southern University’s Center of Transportation Training and Research. 

Ignoring the issue of social justice would be, too, she said. TxDOT has gone to historic lengths to solicit comment but must now reconcile those concerns with its plans and the engineering analysis of how the new freeway and changes to it will affect how people and freight move. 

What is clear, Lewis said, is that TxDOT cannot brush aside how the freeways got where they are now. 

“I think historically TxDOT has been 100 percent guilty of being 100 percent insensitive,” Lewis said, noting what is now I-69 along the east side of downtown gutted Fifth Ward.

How do we get people back on the bus? I wrote a couple of months ago about the essential role of public transportation during the Coronavirus crisis. Now, as local economies reopen, transit agencies need to convince "non-essential" commuters that it is safe to start using transit again:

Masks are mandatory on subways and buses in Washington. San Francisco is betting longer trains will help riders social distance. Crews disinfect New York’s trains daily -- stations twice a day -- and are testing ultraviolet light devices to see if they kill Covid-19 on surfaces. 

As states gradually reopen, transit agencies are taking steps to coax back passengers who’ve been told for months to avoid just such tight quarters with strangers -- an effort that will ultimately influence the economic recovery. 

“For certain businesses teleworking isn’t really an option, so we still need to figure out ways to get those people to work,” said Ed Mortimer, vice president of transportation and infrastructure at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 

Especially in urban areas, where many people don’t own cars, mass transit will be crucial to reviving economies. But enticing passengers back on board may require adding trains and buses so people can space themselves further apart -- adding stress to agencies already reeling from declining ridership and rising cleaning costs.

Public transportation might not be the disease vector it's feared to be, but it's understandable that people are going to be wary of crowding on board buses and trains with other strangers. Transit agencies are poised for a slow and difficult recovery, especially since people are likely to commute differently in a post-COVID world, and they probably need to re-think the way they provide service and define success both during and after the pandemic. That being said, our cities will not experience full economic recovery unless their transit networks also recover.

Could Houston become a climate policy leader? Maybe:

April was supposed to be a big month for Houston city planning. America’s largest unzoned city was poised to host the American Planning Association’s national convention for the first time, bringing thousands of attendees to town. Walking tours were arranged; awkward cocktail mixers were scheduled. 

Of course, with a global outbreak of the coronavirus, it wasn’t meant to be.

I cannot begin to express how much I was looking forward to the APA's National Planning Conference being here in Houston, as I had never attended this event before. Likewise, I cannot begin to express how bummed I was when it was canceled in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. I hope the APA makes plans to return to Houston with this is all over.

Undeterred, Houston quietly adopted the Bayou City’s first citywide climate action plan on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. If city leaders can pull it off, America’s sprawling oil capital could end up teaching a lot to more traditionally green urban strongholds.

The city's climate action plan is intended to be a blueprint to Houston reducing its impact on the environment. Given the city's characteristics - the refineries, the sprawl - that's going to be a challenge, so the plan includes both standard and innovative elements.

The plan includes plenty of mainstay climate-policy prescriptions, including calls to electrify the city’s fleet of vehicles, switch to renewable sources of energy, and improve energy efficiency in buildings. But then things become rather unique. The city’s first bicycle master plan, adopted in 2017, gets a lot of play, as does the MetroNEXT Moving Forward plan, a widely lauded $3.5 billion push to overhaul mass transit in the notoriously auto-oriented city. The emphasis on mobility makes sense, since nearly one-third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, and Houston maintains one of the highest rates of automobile use in the country. 

Toward this same end, one of the plan’s more innovative proposals calls on policymakers to eliminate minimum parking requirements by 2030. While Houston famously lacks zoning — meaning that it doesn’t segregate uses or restrict densities — it still enforces some conventional land-use regulations. These include minimum parking requirements, which mandate that developers build off-street parking for each project, regardless of actual demand. In Houston, this can mean up to two parking spaces for every apartment or four spaces for every thousand square feet of office space.

Houston's lack of zoning, furthermore, might make it easier for the city to redevelop in a sustainable manner, featuring more walkable, mixed-use, higher-density development, than other cities that are incumbered by an onerous development process that is subject to NIMBY interference.

The city has a long way to go before it becomes anyone’s idea of an environmental exemplar. But if all goes according to plan, Houston could soon rank among those cities that have scrapped out-of-date parking requirements — a group that conspicuously doesn’t include progressive stalwarts like Portland and New York City. In a city otherwise famous for its supposed lack of planning, easing up on the right rules might just turn Houston green.

Stay tuned.

"The right thing - just at the wrong time." Take a few minutes to read this excellent XFL postmortem by ESPN's Kevin Seifert. The article takes a look at why the well-funded league suddenly folded (it might not have been completely due to Coronavirus), it's prospects for revival, and the potential for spring football generally:

"We still don't know that spring football works in this country," said Andrew Kline, founder of the investment bank Park Lane, which specializes in sports investments. "Football season is so intense, and it's just associated with the fall season. You wonder if part of the cycle is that people need to come down from it for a while."

I'm obviously a fan of spring football, but its track record is dismal, and as even as the XFL winds its way through bankruptcy proceedings, I'm skeptical that we'll ever see another Houston Roughnecks game again. At any rate, it appears that we could have to go for awhile without any football at all. Which will make my fall miserable, to say the least.

The removal of Confederate statues and monuments should not be a "liberal" endeavor. I can't believe I'm actually linking to Rich Lowry in the National Review, but in this case he's right:

Conservatives […] reflexively oppose politically correct campaigns to destroy anything giving offense. 

They fear where the slippery slope of woke iconoclasm will lead — first it’s Jefferson Davis, ultimately George Washington. 

They value tradition and worry we are trashing part of our history.This impulse, though, is a mistake. Confederate statues and symbols deserve to be reevaluated, and often mothballed. 

The statues are an unnecessary affront to black citizens, who shouldn’t have to see defenders of chattel slavery put on a pedestal, literally. 

It is impossible to evaluate these monuments without considering the context of why they were created. Many of them were erected as part of the push to enshrine a dishonest, prettied-up version of the Confederacy.

Lowry ends by noting that "secession was a traitorous act that threatened to destroy the American nation, to create a rump republic built on slavery, and to make impossible the subsequent rise of the United States to a world power." Liberals and conservatives alike should understand the fact that the Confederate States of America was, quite simply, a racist and treasonous enterprise that was defeated over a century and a half ago.

I occasionally come across the argument that the removal of Confederate statues and monuments is somehow "erasing history." This is bullshit. There are no monuments to Hitler or Rommel or Göring in Germany, but we still know that county's history - a history the German people of today most certainly do not want commemorate.

These statues and monuments belong in museums, battlefields, and military cemeteries. They do not belong in our parks, our squares or our capitol grounds.

Last but not least, congratulations to Liverpool.

Coronavirus cases surge in Houston

Houstonians were hoping to emerge from lockdown to find the Coronavirus pandemic behind us. Unfortunately, that's not what's happening:

An explosion of the novel coronavirus in Houston has put the nation's third-largest* city at the epicenter of the nation's public health crisis as hospitals fill and officials warn of impending catastrophe.

Harris County officials reported a shocking 1,994 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday alone, a new record. The county has reported more than 1,000 new cases on three of the last four days. Models show the number of cases rising over the next four weeks. 

“We're approaching a precipice of disaster,” County Judge Lina Hidalgo (D) told reporters at a briefing this week. “We're looking at very, very concerning numbers in our hospital population that are getting worse by the day.”

Harris County has confirmed more than 23,000 coronavirus cases since the outbreak began. About 330 people have died. Neighboring Fort Bend County has reported another 3,100 cases.

It's not just the Houston area; all of Texas is experiencing a surge in coronavirus cases (that we should have seen coming). Yesterday Governor Greg Abbott ordered bars statewide to close and announced other restrictions, while here in Harris County Judge Lena Hidalgo issued a countywide stay-at-home advisory. While local physicians have applauded these attempts to slow the trend of virus transmission, it may be too little too late.

Quite simply, people here (as in the rest of the country) have become fatigued by the lockdowns, social distancing orders, and other restrictions designed to slow the spread of the virus. Now, with summer upon us, Americans might be giving up on the fight against the pandemic altogether:

For several weeks at the beginning of the outbreak in the U.S., the need to control the virus took precedence over other concerns. Now, for many people, the pandemic is no longer the most pressing national issue. As protesters and some public-health officials have said they are weighing the harms of police violence against the risk of increased viral spread and choosing to gather in the streets, state governments have made similar risk-reward arguments about balancing public-health and economic concerns. The virus does not care about these trade-offs. Retail reopenings and racial-justice protests may exist on different moral planes, but to the virus they both present new environments for spreading. 

Maybe the U.S. will somehow avoid another New York–style outbreak. Maybe the number of new infections will not grow exponentially. Maybe treatments have sufficiently improved that we will see huge outbreaks, but fewer people will die than we’ve come to expect. If so, it won’t be because the United States made concerted, coordinated decisions about how to balance the horrors of the pandemic and the frustration of pausing everyday life. Instead, the United States has moved from attempting to beat the virus to managing the harm of losing.

It's for this reason that another round of shutdowns is unlikely. It's frustrating to realize that we've essentially squandered three months of a social and economic shutdown aimed at combatting the virus, but that's the reality of where we are right now. At this point I fear that we're going to have to continue to limp through this pandemic until either a vaccine becomes available or herd immunity is achieved (at the cost of tens of thousands of more lives).

So stay at home as much as you can, wash your hands, and wear your damn mask when you're out.

Kuff has more, including how we got here.

(*This is an error on The Hill's part. Houston hasn't passed Chicago yet and is still #4.)

Status update

I think I've been able to weather the pandemic as well as anyone, and for that I am thankful. I'm still working from home most of the time, although over the past month my employer has begun allowing some of us to go into the office once or twice a week, on a rotating basis so as to limit the number of people in the office at any one time. I've enjoyed being able to do this, because it keeps me from going stir-crazy at home and it also allows me to get a few things done that are difficult for me to do from home (my employer's VPN connection works well for most of the programs I use, but not all of them, and my home computer, having reached the end of its useful life, is very slow).

As of right now, Corinne and I are going ahead with our rescheduled (not officially a) wedding ceremony next month in New Orleans. We've been in contact with our venue about sanitation practices and, quite frankly, we're going to have so few people attending that social distancing is not going to be a problem. We realize there's still a risk involved, but we're also already locked in to contracts with small businesses that need our support now more than ever. Deferring the ceremony until the pandemic passes in 2021 or even 2022 simply isn't an option, so we're going to be as safe as we can, make the best of it, and give ourselves and our guests something to enjoy during this otherwise difficult period.

Since our previously-planned honeymoon in Maui has been nixed, we will honeymoon in the Great Smoky Mountains instead. We will also drive the Blue Ridge Parkway from the Great Smoky Mountains to Shenandoah National Park (reprising a vacation I took almost a decade ago). That should hopefully give us plenty of opportunities for outdoorsy, socially-distanced activities such as hiking and sightseeing. Corinne and I are looking forward to it.

As of right now I am still holding out hope that there will be a college football season this fall, but I won't be surprised if it gets canceled as well. Which will really suck.

Everybody stay safe!

The essential service of public transit

Right now, the nation's public transportation providers are under a lot of stress. As the coronavirus pandemic grinds life to a halt and forces people to stay at home, ridership has plummeted and the funding sources that sustain them - sales tax and farebox revenue - have dried up. At the same time, agencies are assuming unbudgeted expenses to take precautionary measures such as deep-cleaning and disinfecting vehicles, creating physical separations to ensure social distancing between passengers on buses and trains, and providing protective equipment - masks, gloves, googles - to bus and train operators.

Why would transit agencies even make these considerable expenditures at a time when they're carrying so few passengers? With everything else in our society and economy shut down right now, why don't transit providers just do the same in order to conserve resources?

Transit consultant Jarrett Walker explains why that isn't possible:

Why are agencies behaving this way? Because they are not businesses. And if there’s one thing we must learn from this moment, it’s that we have to stop talking about transit as though ridership is its only purpose, and its primary measure of success. 

Right now, essential services have to keep going. It's not just the hospital, the grocery store, and basic utilities.  It’s the entire supply chain that keeps those places stocked, running, and secure. Almost all of these jobs are low-wage. The people using transit now are working in hospitals that are saving lives. They are creating, shipping and selling urgently needed supplies. They are keeping grocery stores functioning, so we can eat. 

In transit conversations we often talk about meeting the needs of people who depend on transit. This makes transit sound like something we’re doing for them. But in fact, those people are providing services that we all depend on, so by serving those lower income riders, we’re all serving ourselves. 

The goal of transit, right now, is neither competing for riders nor providing a social service for those in need. It is helping prevent the collapse of civilization. 

What’s more, transit has always been doing that. Those “essential service” workers, who are overwhelmingly low-income, have always been there, moving around quietly in our transit systems, keeping our cities functioning. Too often, we have patronized them by calling them needy or dependent when in fact everything would collapse if they couldn’t get to work.

Interestingly, the theme of today’s Google’s “Doodle of the Day” was dedicated to public transportation workers. They are at the front line of the battle against Coronavirus, providing the essential service of getting other essential workers to hospitals, grocery stores, pharmacies, warehouses, and other essential businesses. They are also dying as they provide this essential service.

As I've said before: public transportation, as its name implies, is a public good, like police and fire protection, parks, and libraries. While we ideally want its services to be used as much as possible, its primary purpose (contrary to what its libertarian critics might claim) is not to continually increase ridership or maximize farebox recovery. Its purpose is to provide mobility to the people who need it, including (and especially) in times of crisis.

"In big cities, transit is an essential service, like police and water, without which nothing else is possible, Walker concludes. "Maybe that’s how we should measure its results."

When local personal injury attorneys make ASMR videos

(If you don't understand why this is so funny, see this and this)

The complicated relationship between Coronavirus and toilet paper

Years from now, when we look back at our current Coronavirus pandemic, we will remember it for many reasons: the "stay at home" orders, the parents pressed into service as homeschoolers, the overburdened hospitals, the ever-rising death toll, the shuttered economy, the utter incompetence emanating from the White House, and the sudden scarcity of toilet paper:

The problem, like the virus that spawned it, is global. In Australia, a cafe began accepting rolls of TP as payment — a cup of coffee will run you three rolls. In Hong Kong, armed crooks held up a supermarket; all they took was 600 rolls of the soft stuff. A pet store in Dornburg, Germany, last week set up an outdoor toilet paper drive-through in a parking lot when the owner was able to obtain a massive shipment. 

Nothing seems to be unspooling in the right direction for a commodity that rarely gets much attention: In Hutchins, Tex., a tractor-trailer hauling a full load of toilet paper crashed and burned last week on Interstate 20. Rolls, most charred or reduced to cinders, splayed all over, shutting down the roadway. 

Demand is as flush as supply is bare. Americans have spent $1.4 billion on toilet paper in the past four weeks, a 102 percent increase from the same period a year before, according to data collected by IRI, which tracks retail sales based on the bar codes on products. (Prices have been quite stable over that time.) Only hand sanitizers, disinfectant wipes and the like have seen substantially bigger sales boosts. 

But toward the end of March, TP sales plummeted because the supply just wasn’t there. 

Of all the things to hoard during a viral pandemic, why toilet paper? The reasons are actually rather simple:

1. People know that they will be making fewer trips to the store during the pandemic, so they want to stock up.

2. People are wiping their bottom-parts almost exclusively at home now, rather than at work, or at restaurants and bars and stadiums, which results in an obvious over-demand for home supply:

Collectively, we probably still use the same amount of toilet paper as we did before the pandemic, but suddenly, we’re expected to use more of our own supply. Most people are no longer eating out at restaurants or going to work or school — places where we conveniently use the restroom and the available toilet paper. Georgia-Pacific estimates that the average American household will use about 40 percent more toilet paper than usual if people spend all their time at home. 

As Will Oremus reported for Medium, the toilet paper industry is divided into two markets: consumer (the likes of Quilted Northern, Charmin, or Cottonelle that you use at home) and commercial (bulky rolls of thin, scratchy paper you find in public restrooms). Most toilet paper manufacturers aren’t sure when consumer toilet paper supplies will be “back to normal” because, well, the situation isn’t normal. Businesses, workplaces, schools, and other public spaces that used to order commercial toilet paper have no need for it, while consumer demand has significantly increased. 

Suppliers have to shift gears as demand for consumer toilet paper outweighs that of the commercial sector, but it’s not a simple task. The products are entirely different, down to size and packaging. “Shifting to retail channels would require new relationships and contracts between suppliers, distributors, and stores; different formats for packaging and shipping; new trucking routes — all for a bulky product with lean profit margins,” Oremus reported.

As it turns out, the "toilet paper supply chain" is a real thing, and one that we normally think about. But it's under a lot of stress right now, for a lot of reasons, and it might be scarce for while.

Happy wiping.

Road work ramps up as a city shuts down

There could be a (small) silver lining to Houston's Coronavirus-related economic hiatus:

A lighter load on Houston-area freeways and COVID-19 concerns have not slowed the heavy machinery making way for more lanes or new ramps along many of the routes seeing unprecedented drops in traffic.

Some crews will even ramp up work as traffic takes a coronavirus-induced holiday.

“Lighter traffic on our roadways potentially presents some opportunities to advance some of our work, and that is being assessed on a case-by-case basis,” said Raquelle Lewis, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Transportation in Houston. 

All TxDOT projects remain active, Lewis said.

Houston Public Works and contractors on city jobs also remain out tying steel, pouring concrete and smoothing asphalt, Public Works spokeswoman Erin Jones said this week.

Of course, this is only for projects already in progress. Given how Coronavirus is affecting the business environment, it will be more difficult to prepare construction documents and bids, gather materials and manpower, and complete other tasks needed in order to undertake new projects.

(I should know. I tried to have an online meeting with TxDOT staff earlier today about a future planning study. It was a comedy of errors of lagging computers, reverbing microphones, and malfunctioning "virtual" computer displays. We continue to have actual, in-person meetings in this day and age precisely because they do not "malfunction." I don't think technology will ever replace the primacy and legibility of actual, physical interpersonal interaction.)

There’s also the question as to how work crews will be able to stay healthy and practice "social distancing" while still getting construction tasks completed.

All in all, however, it's generally a good thing that projects intended to improve mobility can be accelerated (and hopefully be closer to completion) by the time the city's traffic returns. It's also good that, even as so many businesses are shuttered and workers sidelined during this crisis, the region's construction workers will still be receiving a paycheck.

I also thought this tidbit was interesting:

Automobile traffic may be down, but bike use in Houston appears to be surging. Trips on Houston B-Cycle — each time one of the bicycles was checked out from a kiosk — were 51 percent higher from Feb. 23 to Tuesday, compared with last year, bike share officials said.

“It’s often more than one factor,” B-Cycle spokesman Henry Morris said. “Personally, I think the combination of good weather, spring break, school and work closures, and the need for solo or small group transportation/recreation options because of social distancing rules are all contributing to the rise in trips.”

Gyms also are closed, leading many to venture out in the pleasant weather.

This is good news. Between the reduction in automobile traffic as well as the nice spring weather, now’s probably a perfect time for a bike ride. As long as bicyclists sanitize the bikes before or after each use and stay six feet apart from each other, of course…

Restaurants will bear the brunt of this crisis

As bad as this Coronavirus crisis is going to get (and it's going to get really, really bad), it is going to be especially devastating for bars and restaurants:

Across America, restaurant dining rooms are empty. Some have locked the door; others have skeleton crews working to fulfill delivery and carry-out orders as customers hunker down in their homes, waiting to see what happens next. 

The coronavirus pandemic — fast-moving, and endangering people who spend time in public spaces — is uniquely poised to take down the restaurant industry as we know it. As if tailor-made to render restaurants unusable, the pandemic is a time bomb. And restaurants will not be able to delivery or takeout their way out of it. 

Many of the restaurants that close during the pandemic will not reopen their doors. Diners should also brace for a restaurant landscape that will be entirely different by the time — however near or far off it may be — they can be safely encouraged to enjoy a crowded night out again. 

“We are about to see a lot of places go broke forever.”

I've already begun seeing local restaurants put out pleas for gift card purchases, "virtual tip jars" for their staffs, and other requests for support on social media. It's heartbreaking. Corinne and I are trying to do our part by ordering takeout from our favorite local restaurants, but it's not particularly good  for our pocketbooks or our waistlines and it's not something we can do indefinitely.

A crisis of this scale and scope, so uniquely damaging to restaurants, is indeed unprecedented. And for now, restaurants are doing their best to stay afloat, ramping up delivery, offering curbside to-go service, promoting merch, offering gift certificates, begging diners to reschedule rather than cancel pre-paid reservations. But the truth is, compared to full dining rooms night after night, these are Band-Aids, temporary stopgaps to stop hemorrhaging money. Gift cards, which are effectively microloans to the restaurant owner, also do little to help workers in the short-term — or restaurants that don’t have the infrastructure to sell them. 

Independent operators need a major infusion of cash — cash that’s more readily available from the government than from their stressed-out customers — to make it. They need rent alleviation, eviction protection, and tax deferrals, at a minimum, to live through this body blow. Who knows what they’ll end up getting.

Restaurants operate on thin margins as it is; even a bad week or two can doom them. There's no telling what a shutdown of this magnitude will do to the industry. 

Both the large groups that have enough cash at hand to “mothball” and the restaurants that can run a successful delivery operation are on borrowed time. This outbreak has no clear end date. There will be businesses that simply cannot afford to stay furloughed or continue doing delivery. 

And when those restaurants that survive do reopen, they’ll do so with their pocketbooks depleted, without an emergency fund to spare should some other unexpected issue hit (and in the restaurant business, there’s always an expense around the corner). They will also reopen their doors to a new world of challenges, not least of which is facing a dining public likely either coming out of or in the midst of a global recession. Those diners who lost income after supply-chain disruption and nationwide business closures due to social distancing will simply have less money to spend on dining.

Chronicle food critic Alison Cook fears for the future of Houston's unique and vibrant restaurant culture:

I could go on at length about the ways in which our Houston restaurants and bars are a powerful economic engine we can’t afford to lose. About the fact that they’re the city’s fourth largest industry, and the dire social consequences of all those jobs evaporating. About the whopping sales taxes restaurants and bars feed into the Texas treasury, gone like the wind. 

All that pales, however, next to the particular cultural importance restaurants have to Houston. Here in a city that has been on the leading edge of demographic change in America since the 1970s, restaurants have functioned as a kind of crossroads and social glue. 

Dining rooms, food truck and barbecue lines alike are public squares where different kinds of Houstonians come together to check out each others’ cuisines — and each other. If we think of ourselves as a tribe these days, and I maintain that we do, much of that awareness has sprung from our collective enthusiasm for our freewheeling culinary mix. Thanks to Viet-Cajun crawfish, Tex-Mex barbecue and a hundred other manifestations of our diversity, it always tastes as if there is more that unites us as a city than divides us.

I’ve watched it all happen over my long career as a student of Houston foodways. And that is where my grief gets so personal. I grew up along with the city’s growing worldliness and embrace of a riot of cultures. It has been my privilege to chronicle that change, to dissect and try to explain the restaurants big and small that helped make it all happen. 

Our vivid regional cuisine, once ignored by the world at large, is now celebrated as the city’s foremost attraction. We built this, fellow citizens, with our skills and curiosity, our adventurous spirit and our financial support. To see it all threatened now seems unbearable to me. 

I have a lot of friends and acquaintances that work in the service in food and beverage service industry. They are going through very tough time right now. I hope everything works out in the end, but I'm also bracing myself for a future in which some of my favorite dining spots and watering holes are no more.

Kuff is just as concerned as I am.

Love (and Marriage) in the Time of Coronavirus

Yesterday was supposed to have been the Big Day for Corinne and me. It was supposed to be the day our friends and family came to New Orleans to celebrate our wedding. We had spent well over a year (and many thousands of dollars) meticulously planning the entire experience: the venue, the food, the music.

Of course, none of that happened yesterday. Neither we nor our friends nor our families went to New Orleans. We did not have a ceremony. We did not eat and dance at a reception afterwards. The wedding that we so carefully planned did not happen.

We had been approaching the wedding date with a background awareness of the Coronavirus situation, but it wasn't until a couple of weekends ago - when SXSW in Austin was canceled and the first guests informed us that they would probably not be attending out of concern for their safety - that we began to become truly concerned. Over the following days more events were canceled - the Rodeo, sports - and more of our guests expressed concern about traveling to our wedding. We found ourselves among those with upcoming wedding plans who were agonizing about what to do: continue as planned, even though many people - our parents included - might not be able to attend due to the risk involved, or cancel, disrupting everyone's plans at the last minute and potentially incurring thousands of dollars in lost deposits and cancelation fees.

However, after Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards decreed two Fridays ago that schools be closed and that all public gatherings larger than 250 be canceled, we saw the writing on the wall. Even though our gathering would be smaller than 250 people, we knew things would only get worse as the number of positive Coronavirus cases in the New Orleans area increased. We couldn't ask our guests to put themselves at risk by attending our ceremony.

So we called our wedding off.

After hurriedly working with our venue and other vendors (all of which have been awesome!), we tentatively rescheduled for a date in July of this year and informed our guests as quickly as we could.

There's no telling if the Coronavirus situation will have passed by July - Louisiana is being badly affected by the virus outbreak right now and some epidemiologists are forecasting that it will take 18 months before this plague is brought under control - but it's the date the venue had available. Even if the Coronavirus threat does pass, there's no guarantee that the society and economy on the other side of it will even let us have a wedding. We're very worried about our vendors - our venue/caterer, our baker, our photographer, our deejay - and can only hope that they make it through the difficult weeks ahead.

Sure enough, last Monday the Centers for Disease Control suggested that all events of fifty or more people - weddings included - be canceled. That same day, the Mayor of New Orleans ordered that all "public and private gatherings" be canceled and that people not gather in groups larger than "the number of people in a reasonable household" in order to reduce social interaction and transfer of the virus. Had we not postponed our wedding, the decision would have been made for us.

But that's not the end of this story.

As the seriousness of the Coronavirus situation unfolded over the last week, Corinne and I began to discuss the need to be able to make legal and medical decisions for each other, should the need arise. We also found ourselves in a defiant mood: why should we allow this pandemic to interrupt our plans for our relationship?! It didn't hurt that we also had in our possession a marriage license from the State of Louisiana that would be valid through the end of the month.

So we made a few phone calls, and last Friday morning we drove from Houston to Lake Charles, Louisiana to meet our pastor, Tommy Dillon (the rector at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Baton Rouge) at a park on the south side of town. A couple of our friends drove separately and met us there in order to serve as witnesses. My son was with us as well, but unfortunately our parents were not as they are elderly and high-risk. (There were seven of us total, so we complied with the Governor's most recent prohibition of gatherings of ten people or more. We were careful not to touch each other and sanitized our hands frequently.)

It was raining, so we ended up having a brief ceremony underneath a picnic pavilion, with our bottles of hand sanitizer serving as paperweights to keep our marriage documents from blowing away and my son serving as photographer. It was not the most romantic setting, but it was nevertheless a moving and meaningful ceremony.

 

 

Afterwards we bid our pastor and witnesses farewell and drove to the Calcasieu Parish Clerk of Court to file the marriage license. All the bars and restaurants in Lake Charles were closed, so we couldn’t celebrate there. Corinne and I drove back home in the rain as husband and wife.

Even though we are now legally married, we still want to have our full ceremony in New Orleans with all of our family and friends. Corinne still plans to get her hair done and wear her wedding dress. We still plan to serve delicious food and dance to party tunes at our reception.

But as of right now, who knows when, or even if, it will happen.

UPDATE: Episcopal News Service interviewed Rev. Dillon regarding his ministry during the COVID-19 crisis. He used Corinne and I as an example of his work:

With the situation changing swiftly and unpredictably, Dillon is working with those he serves to meet their needs in a flexible way. He was scheduled to marry Corinne Perez and Thomas Gray of Houston, Texas, in New Orleans on March 21, with a full Eucharist and a reception. When those plans were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dillon encouraged them to get married anyway, recognizing that a couple’s legal status would be critically important in the event of a medical emergency. 

“I talked to them and I was like, ‘You know what? This is a time when the wedding needs to happen. Because, no matter what happens, you need to be legally married,’” Dillon said. “And so I said, ‘Let’s make this happen." 

The couple had a Louisiana marriage license, so Dillon suggested they meet in Lake Charles, Louisiana – near the border with Texas, and about halfway between Houston and Baton Rouge – on March 20 and have a big celebration with friends and family later. In keeping with health officials’ guidelines on physical distancing, it was a very small service: just Dillon, the couple, and a few friends as witnesses, who drove in separate cars. Standing by a picnic table in a park, Perez and Gray became husband and wife. 

“It was one of the holiest weddings I’ve ever officiated at,” Dillon said. “I said, ‘The kingdom of God is right here in the middle of this pandemic.’”

No-so-good monarch news

Just in case things aren't depressing enough right now:

The number of monarch butterflies that showed up at their winter resting grounds decreased about 53% this year, Mexican officials said Friday. 

Some activists called the decline “heartbreaking," but the Mexico head of the World Wildlife Fund said the reduction “is not alarming.”

WWF Mexico director Jorge Rickards said the previous year's large numbers were "atypical" and the monarchs had returned to their average population levels of recent years. 

The government commission for natural protected areas said the butterflies' population was “stable,” even though they covered only 2.8 hectares (6.9 acres) this year. That was down from 6.05 hectares (14.95 acres) the previous year. Because the monarchs cluster so densely in pine and fir trees, it is easier to count them by area rather than by individuals.

Not everybody agrees with Rickards' assessment, however.

In contrast to Rickards' view, Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, wrote that “scientists were expecting the count to be down slightly, but this level of decrease is heartbreaking."

"More protections are clearly needed for this migratory wonder and its habitat,” Curry wrote.

Environmentalist and author Homero Aridjis said that “the decline of over 53% of populations in the butterfly reserve is worrisome, above all because of the effects of climate change on the migration route and on the wintering grounds in Mexico.”  

Aridjis said crime and deforestation in Mexico is also a cause for alarm. One butterfly activist and a part-time guide in the reserve were murdered earlier this year.

Monarch Watch director Chip Taylor had predicted that the overwintering population would be lower this year than last, based on the following factors:

Population growth
• Less than optimal egg distribution in March and April
• Later recolonization of the Upper Midwest
• Low monarch production in Iowa and maybe western portions of the upper Midwest
• Lower summer temperatures than in 2018 

Migration
• Late migrations are associated with lower numbers reaching Mexico
• Droughts are associated with lower numbers reaching Mexico
• High numbers in the northeast do not translate to high overwintering numbers
• Northeast butterflies take too long to migrate southwest

Even so, Taylor expected the overwintering population to occupy 4.7 hectares, which means that the actual numbers were worse than his prediction.

As good as last year's numbers were, they very clearly appear to be an outlier in the Monarch Watch graph:

The bottom line: the monarch butterfly migration continues to be threatened by herbicide and pesticide use along the migratory path, illegal logging in the overwintering region, and climate change in general.

Since people have a lot more time to do things like gardening these days, my suggestion is the same as it's always been: plant that milkweed.