Every time I go back to my hometown, Greenville I bemoan the changes over the past twenty years. But how much has it really changed compared to myself? I’ve been working and studying in the city for twenty years now and my connection is most distant to the town I grew up in.
But more than that, I’ve also become more wilder and aware of places far beyond the borders of the town I few up in. Greenville is rural and it’s farm country but at 25 miles from Albany it’s still very exurban. Compared to the deep rural country of Madison County – to say nothing of the Allegheny Wilds of Pennsylvania or the back country of West Virginia.
And thanks to the internet I’ve been exposed to greater and more wild country in places like the Mid-West, and the true West like Idaho. I’ve been able to learn about off-griders and homesteaders who really are living on the frontier. I’ve learned about cattle ranchers and dairyman, goat farmers and trappers. Often residing on far greater acreages than is common in an commuter town on the far outskirts of Albany.
It’s not to say that I didn’t grow up in a town of country boys and gals, that there aren’t still cattle and hills and hollers on the back roads. But I’ve experienced far more wild places even in New York State to say nothing of those other states I’ve visited. There are many other towns that smell like cows, places where they homes are far more spread out, where the mountains are bigger and the people are more wild.
Greenville might be rural and the Catskill Mountains looming large, but it’s no Idaho or even West Virginia. In many ways I’ve outgrown my old town both in my dreams and hopes, and while it has changed so I have during my past twenty years away.
Like most towns in New York State, Bethlehem doesn't have Wards. All elected officials are elected at-large.
But could you draw equal population districts that represent actual communities of interest? Not looking a demographics or political competitiveness, but actual communities of interest based on my knowledge of the town -- like Slingerlands, Delmar, Elsmere, Glenmont or South Bethlehem, and have them come out to be equal population? I tried, and here was the results.
There are different ways to look at this problem. One could use an algorithm to draw districts, although I've yet to find one that does a particularly good job. Turns out it's hard to automate district drawing, as often different demographics live next to one and another, and you get stuck with pockets of similar demographics living on opposite ends of the town. You end up packing and cracking or splitting similar demographics, unintentionally. It always seems like equal population is enemy of building communities of interest.
Drawing districts is a fascinating GIS question. But often the best districts are still drawn by humans, watching the totals add up in redistricting plugin, and then looking at maps of demographics. And that involves a lot of acceptance of the fact that districts you have drawn still have a lot of problems with packing and cracking. I don't like how this ultimately came out, but the equal population constraint really causes a lot of problems. Having more districts, might help solve the problem.
The qgis plugin I used for this was the Statto Software Redistricter, using a PL 94-171 Census Data joined against the block-level files. I didn't load any political or demographic graphics, just raw population along with my knowledge of what the neighborhoods look like from a map and having explored them in person, with a goal of grouping highly dense and very rural neighborhoods separately. A goal that was largely a failure in this effort! But it is a fun thought experiment.
I didn’t start abusing caffeine until this morning. Up early with lots of spinach and onions and a couple of eggs in a frying pan with a side of oatmeal and bananas ground up with some maple syrup.
Taking the earlier bus in this morning , I might walk over to Menands to get my steps in. This bus is always early so I often miss it. Not riding in today because I have a town meeting to go to with Save the Pine Bush .
Was up and reading more of the book about sustainable house building. I think this book is fairer, it’s not caught up in all this wokeness crap that so much of the greenies are into. I don’t fear every chemical and I want things to last but are there better, proven simpler less toxic ways of doing things? Is always the most technology complex ways to do things always best? I have a lot of questions ever since I tabled for Save the Pine Bush a few years ago at the Capital Region Green Fair or whatever that was called.
One good thing about the current president is he has opened a lot of discussion about how we do things, and how much of modern America has become about meaningless actions rather than substantive change. Recycling, electric cars and solar panels sure are trendy but do they change anything or is it just DEI program? Maybe we need more radical changes. And we should be questioning scientists even if their research and analysis is vital for good decision making. What green technologies are right for the modern homestead?
This has lately become one of my favorite phrases to mock the ever so common home for sale posting I see on Zillow and other sites – buy this rural house with a long commute on one acre of land!
You might ask where I came up with such a phrase, but it really go back to my days in my youth as a Boy Scout in Clarksville, that small hamlet in the Town of New Scotland off NY 443. We met at Clarksville Church, and during times in spring and the fall when either Meadow Brook Dairy’s Van Wie or Tommell Cattle where spreading, it could definately be pungent at times from the dairy-air. I just remember the look at that farm kid whose dad picked them up, after quite apparently working with silage and not showering after. Now pungent! As boy scouts, and young people we made a lot of jokes, mostly very mean spirited about farm folks and smell of cattle.
Clarksville is very much a small town, hamlet. It smells like cow shit at times, and it is quite small and walkable, though there are few businesses one can actually walk to as general store is long gone and they’ve struggled to even keep a pizza place open. But truth is there is probably some appeal to living in a small town, like you probably know your neighbors and there aren’t the issues of big cities like homeless and drug addicted people. Not that you see much of them outside of downtown. But also so many of those houses, especially in the hamlet, are so close together. Rural living but not without a lot of land.
Rural hamlets reminds me a lot of campgrounds. I guess it’s camping to sleep in a tent or a camper on a driveway packed right in next to another camper. I mean, I guess camping in a campground in strictest sense is camping, it’s not the same as sitting in a house or an apartment downtown, though many of the tow-behind campers are essential miniature homes on wheels. And in many cases, people who build their own homes, or need inexpensive living in a rural location live in those RVs.
But at least in my mind, that’s not camping. It’s certainly not the kind of camping I enjoy, where in most cases the nearest campsite is a 1/4 mile or farther away, per the requirements of the Adirondack State Land Master Plan, or just the general terrain of the back country. Places where I can shoot guns, listen to music, have a roaring fire and even burn a plastic trash or smoke some grass without anybody caring one way or the other. I have to say all my time camping in remote back country, far away from people kind of informs how I want to live, and even 5 acres, much less 3 or less acres, just seems much too close to live to anybody else. Yet, it’s hard to find places like that – just like it’s hard to find places that I like camp at that are less then hour, and often as much as two hours away from home.
The thing is so many even rural houses, are essentially suburban these days with high-speed internet, large televisions, propane or oil climate control, curbside weekly garbage pick-up and of course essentially unlimited grid-powered electriciiy. If a rural house is not actively homesteading or farming, it is almost completely divorced from landscape, except maybe when they step out their door and take a deep breathe of the dairy air in spring time. And much like camping in a crowded campground, with RVs and tents back to back, what do you get with such living, besides a long commute, quickly tired and junked automobiles and large gas bills for your 4×4 pickup driven to city every day?
That’s my take on the auto-pen controversy. It’s fine to challenge the validity of Biden’s pardons based on whether or not he used an auto-pen, but ultimately what will happen is they’ll haul poor Joe Biden in front of a judge, and the judge is going to ask him, did you sign or direct somebody to sign these pardons on your behalf using an auto sign device? Was it your intent, as president to pardon these individuals? He will answer both questions yes, wasting a whole bunch of people’s time and money, and the case will be dismissed.
…
, I might walk over to Menands 
to get my steps in. This bus is always early so I often miss it. Not riding in today 
because I have a town meeting to go to with Save the Pine Bush 
.
more of the book about sustainable house 
building. I think this book is fairer, it’s not caught up in all this wokeness crap that so much of the greenies are into. 
I don’t fear every chemical and I want things to last but are there better, proven simpler less toxic ways of doing things? Is always the most technology complex ways to do things always best? I have a lot of questions ever since I tabled for Save the Pine Bush a few years ago at the Capital Region Green Fair or whatever that was called. 
and how much of modern America has become about meaningless actions rather than substantive change. Recycling, electric cars and solar panels sure are trendy but do they change anything or is it just DEI program? Maybe we need more radical changes. And we should be questioning scientists even if their research and analysis is vital for good decision making. What green technologies are right for the modern homestead? 
