By now, most readers of Seven Days must know that the barn at Pete’s Greens in Craftsbury burned to the ground on the frigid night of January 12, taking with it all the farm’s packing and storage equipment, and a quarter-million dollars’ worth of produce and meat. The barn itself was insured for only three-quarters of its value, the food not at all. At least for the moment, Pete Johnson has lost the farm.

Read more at Seven Days.

Governor David Paterson was equally unapologetic. No, no, he told a TV reporter. The pace of building is not too fast.

Both men suggested that the 23 percent building increase in the last five years was not related to the 83 percent rise in construction accidents, accounting for 15 deaths this year alone.

Hey, risks must be taken. Sacrifices must be made. Fourteen-million-dollar condos must go up.

“If [Bloomberg] shuts down all activity until cranes are proven safe, he’s going to shut down billions of dollars of economic activity in New York,” the dean of the Baruch School of Public Affairs told the Times Sunday. “He can’t do that and nobody would want him to.”

Nobody would want him to?

Funny. I’ve yet to meet anyone who does not want him to. I have no friend who can afford to live or rent in any of the new buildings. I have spoken to no neighbor or local shopkeeper who does not regard with sadness and dread the city filling up with luxury housing, mega-office complexes, and sports stadiums.

In rent-stabilized buildings around the city, tenants are up in arms as landlords harass them to make room for market-rate residents. At hearings to impose building moratoria and downzone communities it is standing room only.

“The mayor doesn’t do anything,” a neighbor of the East 91st Street crash told the New York Observer. “They don’t care about the working-class people. Nobody cares about the tenants.” Said another: “We are furious.”

Not to worry, we’re told, as applications to restrict building heights and densities languish at City Planning and finding a parking space becomes a strategic feat, or a miracle. Economic development is an unmitigated boon.

Why, then, does it seem that the windfall of economic development is mitigating nothing more than the effects of economic development?

Public school classrooms are so packed now there’s no place for kids to sit, much less learn. A few of the new buildings are slated to have schools in them—for instance, Frank Gehry’s Beekman Towers in Tribeca. But the city issued almost 9,500 permits for new apartments in 2007. Where will all those new kids go to school?

New construction is supposed to solve the housing crisis. But as costs soar, the lower end of the mix of “mixed-income” housing falls off the agenda. Developers—like Forest City Ratner, preparing for Brooklyn Atlantic Yards—demolish affordable housing to build “sub-market-rate” housing, which is unaffordable to most New Yorkers. Meanwhile, the City announces that budget cuts will force 15% rent rises in public housing and the closing of community centers and programs.

New development brings jobs and new enterprise, say its promoters. What jobs? Selling hotdogs at the new football and baseball stadiums? Or dishes at Pottery Barn, when rising commercial rents force out the local designer furniture makers and shoe repairmen in the developing neighborhoods?

Developers of high rises must provide green spaces, the Administration crows. But don’t those spaces (when they actually materialize) open up the same ground and sky blotted out by the high rises? Bryant Park in midtown—already wall-to-wall bodies during any sunny lunch hour—will soon have to accommodate 13,600 new workers in two immense towers going up on its periphery. How?

Perhaps City Hall has always been a wholly owned subsidiary of the equivalent of Forest City Ratner. Perhaps there’s never been a time when New Yorkers didn’t wake up to the sound of jackhammers, when life here was not noisy, crowded, and chaotic. When workers did not fall to their deaths from skyscrapers and cranes.

But the question is always the same: who benefits?

The job of public officials is to ensure that the answer is the public—not just developers, but the rest of us.

Most New Yorkers don’t want their city transformed into a cross between Dubai and Alphaville. We do not want every New Yorker to be displaced by an emir or a Tokyo billionaire. We work here, go to school, ride the subways, pay taxes, and vote here now. We live here and would like to keep doing so—decently.

Economic growth is not worth the loss of our quality of life—or a single worker’s life.

This article originally appeared on CounterPunch.

I don’t want to pay more than my share. But I’m happy to pay my share.

I wasn’t so avid until a year ago. That’s when I undertook a radical experiment in consumption, or rather, its antithesis: I went a year without shopping. For stimulation and meaning, I threw myself onto the offerings of the public sphere. There, I felt gratitude, grief, and finally, ownership.

The idea came to me in late 2003. I was panicked about my maxed-out credit card, depressed by visions of cast-off Christmas toys and electronics mounting up in the landfills. I wondered: what if I tried to duck out of the marketplace? Was it even possible in the 21^st century to maintain a social or political life, or an identity, without purchasing?

Single-handedly, I wasn’t going to save the world’s workers or its ozone layer – or cripple the economy. Overconsumption is a huge problem, requiring national and global policy solutions. But shopping is personal. I wanted to explore the connection between what we do and feel at the “point of purchase” and what happens out there.

Starting January 1, my partner, Paul, and I vowed to buy only necessities. We said yes to grocery ingredients, insulin for our diabetic cat, and Internet access for our businesses. Among the no-nos were clothes, books, CDs, restaurant meals, and movies.

Instead of spending our hours and dollars in the shops and cinemas, we passed Friday evenings at the Brooklyn Public Library and Sundays cycling the Hudson River Park trail. We wandered the streets, alert to New York’s spontaneous street theatre.

The library was ababble with immigrants learning English and English-speakers (including Paul) acquiring new tongues. Our bike rides took us from the buff men sunning on the piers to the Dominicans playing soccer at the north end of Manhattan, surrounded by salsa music, kids, and massive picnics. We whiled away hours mesmerized by the dancing fountain outside the Brooklyn Museum.

But much as we reveled in our city’s free spaces, we also grieved the condition they are in. The librarians couldn’t afford to replace lost books. When the museum fountain broke, it remained dry for months.

In the U.S., politicians of both parties parrot the dogma that private is always better than public – on either the revenue or the expenditure side. So, in 2004, faced with budget shortages, New York’s mayor floated a proposal to peddle corporate sponsorships, along with naming rights, to subway stations, buses, and bridges. Paul came home one day from his Italian class, singing out, “I love our library!” It occurred to me that he might not feel so proprietary if “our library” were the Bertelsmann BookCenter or Burger King’s Read It Your Way.

We Americans also tend to think of the government as a company. We pay our taxes for the product – our nation — and if not 100 percent satisfied, want to call Customer Service and demand our money back. The less we pay in taxes, we’re encouraged to believe, the more we have left for what we really want and need. Happiness is having your own – your own swimming pool, transportation, or healthcare account.

In the rest of the developed world, taxes are higher. So is public investment. The municipal pools are open, the trains go everywhere, and everyone gets basic healthcare. There’s less left for private consumption. Still, people seem to have what they want and need: Europeans consistently report higher levels of wellbeing than Americans do.

During our year, spending less on ourselves meant giving more to others, whether those were political candidates or tsunami victims. At the same time, our expenses, including deductible business expenses, fell. For instance, on my 2003 tax return, I claimed $719 in “professional viewing tickets”; in 2004, I entered a zero on that line. In 2004, therefore, I paid more taxes on similar income. And because my spending has not reverted to pre-2004 levels ($455 for tickets), again in 2005, I’m sending a substantial check to the IRS.

Am I gleeful? Come on. But I no longer feel I am mailing “my” money away to “them,” the less fortunate, or to “it,” a distant government detached from my life. In 2004, the libraries became mine, the parks, mine. If they were broke, it was up to me – us, our government: me – to finance them.

A year without shopping transformed me from consumer to citizen.

A third of Greensboro (pop. 770, tripled in summer) was meeting representatives of Northeast Kingdom Human Services, which wants to convert the former Lakeview Inn to a residential treatment facility for eight mentally ill patients moving from the hospital to the world.

After rejecting 50 properties, NKHS was smitten by the inn – its capacious grace, broad vistas and meticulous, code-compliant historic restoration. And who wouldn’t adore Greensboro, a perfect cluster of white clapboard on the shores of Lake Caspian, anchored by the grand general store Willey’s?

On January 19, NKHS and the landowner agreed to terms. The next day, Executive Director Eric Grims informed the selectboard. On January 24, he talked to the Caledonian Record, whence the rest of Greensboro found out. “There seems to be a good positive energy surrounding the project,” the reporter paraphrased Grims.

He could not have been more wrong.

Letters flew to the agency’s office. Lakeview neighbor Lucas Lonegren posted a blog, where information-sharing turned to fulminating, then to organizing. Lonegren deleted flames, but contributors who voiced support for NKHS were promptly denounced – or ignored.

By February 3, rage was hot. The audience fidgeted as Grims discoursed on square footage, and Division Director Cathy Rousse on “inspiring creativity in people whose creativity has been thwarted.”

Then it spoke.

Argument was both eminently rational and surfeited with emotion. Everyone endorsed the “concept” of community-based recovery – just someplace else in town (though no place is available) and not at Greensboro’s “gateway.” The next-door neighbor, a planner, pronounced the site “inappropriate,” the word of the evening.

People felt blindsided, though it’s hard to say they could have been told earlier.

They were outraged as taxpayers, though Grims explained that at $1.4 million, the inn is cheaper than new construction.

Some fear was bald. Warren Hill read a headline: Man Pleads Innocent to Vermont Shooting Spree. “Can you guarantee me that a person like this will not end up here?” he demanded.

Anger turned defiant. “You could not have chosen a worse place to try to buy,” threatened Andy Dales, representing the 500-member second-home-owners’ Greensboro Association.

Empathy swelled momentarily when Elizabeth Leopold, former attorney and daughter of Greensboro, confessed, “I’m a client of the system,” with three suicide attempts and two involuntary commitments. She saw “nothing wrong” with a group home at Greensboro’s gateway. Neither might others, if NKHS could deliver only patients like the patrician Liz, and not like the grizzled male stranger growling over the cookies.

Arguments contradicted each other.

The town was too rural to serve this population. But the facility should be further outside the village – more rural.

The agency could not guarantee the town’s safety. But learning that no dangerous patients would be accepted and all would be monitored 24/7, two staff per resident, people grew suspicious: If they’re not dangerous, why so much supervision?

A beloved building was being “taken from the economy.” Grims avowed that NKHS pays its taxes in every host town. Hill responded, “Sir, I do not believe it.”

The meeting was billed as “informational,” but few seemed eager to be informed, much less persuaded.

It would be easiest to chalk up Greensboro’s reaction to fear of the mentally ill, whom many wrongly associate with violence, compounded by the pique of a monied summer community accustomed to getting its way. No doubt, these are in the mix.

But working-class communities also resist group homes. Institutions change neighborhoods, and nobody likes change, especially when the status quo is as copacetic as in Greensboro.

What else is going on?

For one thing, democracy is frustrated. The Caledonian presented a done deal; the state, having screwed up in Waterbury, wants Greensboro to trust it. Greensboro would sooner trust its local government. But while Grims called the selectboard, he doesn’t need its consent or, with eight residents, even a zoning variance.

Property, which ordinarily affords the summer people formidable sway over Greensboro society, now is the problem. Lake-home owners once prohibited sales to Jews and other undesirables. Now faced with another perceived undesirable, they are at the mercy of one private landowner.

“A bigger social dilemma” is at play, too, comments Janice Irvine, a University of Massachusetts sociologist. “Since deinstitutionalization, people have either been dumped into the streets to become homeless or placed in community homes, which are difficult for every community. As a society, we have

not found a way either to integrate or to separate out the mentally ill.”

Greensboro is not letting its emotions overtake its reason. Emotions are increasingly legitimized as public argument. The president acts from his gut. Policy is mobilized by hatred – of sex offenders, terrorists, even opposing party members. Certain emotions, though, are more legitimate than others. Cynicism is called realism, while the hope and trust that Rousse invoked are dismissed as sucker-bait. “These are nice concepts,” one resident told her, “but they’re pie in the sky.”

NKHS doesn’t want to move where it’s not wanted. But the state is desperate to shutter the state hospital, and another proposed facility was gunned down in Vergennes.

If it does move in, the agency promises to work with the community to find its tolerance. Some local supporters, such as physician Mark Lichtenstein and Chelsea school principal Carl Stein, have volunteered to help.

If it does move in, what might happen is what happened with civil unions, another passionately opposed change: nothing.

Or, something good could happen. “I hope you will open your hearts to your unwanted brothers and sisters, your extended family,” state representative and “psychiatric survivor” Ann Donahue implored at the Friday meeting.

They might not get the chance. By Tuesday, claiming to represent a majority, the selectboard wrote the health commissioner and NKHS asking them to inform Greensboro, “in writing and as soon as possible,” that the plan has been abandoned.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

Before the fire trucks had left Main Street, townspeople were raising money, donating everything from furniture to new underwear, and making up the beds in their spare rooms for the disabled and elderly tenants driven into the cold in their nightclothes. The Village Restaurant served free coffee and cocoa. Bond Auto opened its bathrooms to the firefighters. Grand Union sent boxes of food. A rescue crewman commented, “Sandwiches and coffee kept appearing all day.” An arts organizer and the owner of the old general store in East Hardwick offered the food co-op temporary space. Somebody saved a cat from the flames.

Beyond the impromptu rescue and relief, some usually unnoted features of smallness also came to light. Action was unhampered by bureaucracy. As soon as he learned of the fire, janitor Joe Martineau unlocked the elementary school doors to give shelter to the tenants. The relatively rich and the relatively poor — the real-estate agent who has benefited from the recent rise in property values and the low-income residents who are its victims — were displaced side by side. Hippie and hairdresser, antiques dealer and Chinese restaurateur, pagan and evangelical Christian saw their businesses drowned in sludge. And farmer, lawyer, carpenter, office worker, homemaker and blacksmith were there to help, side by side.

“The community rallied in a remarkable way,” commented Rob Levine of the American Red Cross.

Charlie Volk, an electrician who serves on the Hardwick Select Board, found light in the billowing black smoke. “It was endearing to watch,” he said of the town’s efforts. “I think it’s going to overcome the political divisions in town.”

I hope Charlie is right. But even if he’s not, he made me think about compassion and politics, their relationship and differences.

One of the pleasures of life in a small town is the opportunity to express your good will directly — to cook for the community dinner, mentor a sixth-grader, or drive the ambulance. You also get to feel gratitude directly, if you happen to be the recipient of your neighbor’s largesse. Of course, the opposite is also true. Enmities and feuds are up front and personal, and they tend to be passed down, like heritable diseases, from generation to generation.

It’s hard to sort feelings from politics in a place like Hardwick. For if all politics is local, all local politics is personal; the smaller the town, the more personal it is. Last summer, a cell tower proposed for construction in a pasture on Bridgman Hill tore the town in two. Each faction accused the other of selfishness; each claimed to be acting for the public good. The dispute turned especially nasty when a few tower supporters started running ads in the Gazette making unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks on Zoning Board members. And it isn’t over. Both sides are appealing the board’s compromise decision.

But compassion and anger are not the same as politics, and it would be a mistake to say that good policy is simply righteous feeling codified. Policymaking may start with emotion, but it must step away from emotion toward principles and practicality — the vision of a good society, plus the logical consideration of a law’s consequences, intended or not.

For example: Just about everyone feels rage toward murderers and sympathy for their victims. But do those feelings justify the state execution of murderers? Opponents must overcome their revulsion to the crime itself and sometimes ignore the wishes of the victim’s loved ones. Proponents must ask if death sentences can be justly handed down. Both need to think about what policies best protect the public. Feelings — even ethics — of forgiveness or vengeance, no matter how justified or widespread, are not enough to make good law.

Another difference between personal acts and politics is the question of control. Many generous philanthropists feel obligated to help the less fortunate. Yet they oppose taxes that might alleviate the poverty of the very institutions or families to whom they give their money. Why? They’d rather write their own checks than be required by the government to do so or allow their money to be distributed by elected officials.

Paul Cillo, Hardwick’s former State Representative and my significant other, invokes the Vermont state motto, “Freedom and Unity,” to talk about these questions. Most people want to promote personal freedom and responsibility, he says; they also want the government to serve the public good, which may mean curtailing freedom and helping some people who aren’t particularly responsible. It’s not a choice between private charity and welfare, private freedom and public unity, though: “The political fight is always over where you draw the line between the two.”

Perhaps because loss is a universal experience, compassion is a near-universal virtue. I’d surmise it is distributed equally between conservatives and progressives, religionists and atheists. Compassion is not sufficient to pay the firefighters or house the homeless, however, and in politics, we rarely even agree on what acts comprise it. Still, as Charlie Volk suggests, an outpouring of simple good acts warms a public spirit badly in need of warming — like coffee for a suddenly homeless woman standing in her nightgown in a school gym.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.