The US Election & Housing for the Vulnerable

President Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration on January 20, 1981 from the west side of the Capitol of the United States marked a distinct physical change from all previous Presidents since the Capitol of the United States formally moved to Washington DC from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1800. When the US’s third President Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated on March 3, 1801, Jefferson faced east as was intended by Pierre Charles L-Enfant, who in 1792 designed the city of Washington.

At noon, January 20, 2021 President Joe Biden facing west will swear to uhold the Constitution of the United States and “defend it against all enemies foreign and domestic..” President Biden will be elected overwhelmingly because of a single issue campaign: Covid 19. The corona virus has already killed over 220,000 of our people.This week virus cases escalated in 48 of our 50 US States. Between now and January my country will experience over 200,00 additional deaths.

Four years before Reagan broke the mold designed by L’Enfant and codified by Jefferson, I walked six blocks from my apartment on East Capitol Street to attend the Inauguration of Jimmy Carter. I walked [I could walk then] past the Library of Congress to my left, past the Supreme Court on my right into glorious grounds designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (who also designed New York City’s Central Park) then into the massive parking lot in front of the Capitol of the United States.

Map courtesy US Capitol Visitors Center. The west is to the left; east right.

Often late at night, I walked that walk from 1973 when I arrived in DC as a permanent resident until 1990 when I left to take a job as a technical writer for a telecommunications company in Durham, North Carolina.

For noon on January 20, 1976, this was my destination:

President Jimmy Carter takes the oath of office, the last President to do so from the east side of the Capitol (see below) looking across from the top of Capitol Hill to the city of L”Enfant’s design. Instead, four years later President Reagan established a precedent which will continue in January 2021, when President Biden will swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States looking down the hill in the direction of the White House.

Joel Solkoff’s Column Vol. VI, Number 5

Friday, October 30, 2020, Williamsport PA, five days before the US Election, the most important US election in my 73 year lifetime. The outcome of this election is not merely important to me as a elderly man among the most vulnerable because I have a damaged immune system as a consequence of treatment for cancer that also caused me to be a paraplegic. It is also import, indeed critically significant, because a rational problem president provides hope that my three grandchildren might have a future as citizens of this country I have sworn to uphold multiple times. Most especially, this country of my birth and allegiance must bind up the wounds that divide us as Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and Whatnots.

In 1789, Pierre Charles L’Enfant (then a military engineer in the Continental Army) wrote to President Washington asking him to design a federal city. Washington told L’Enfant to chill. The Constitution had just been ratified. There was no agreement regarding regarding a location for a permanent capital. Wikipedia notes, “When Jefferson ran into Hamilton at President Washington’s residence in New York City in late June 1790, Jefferson offered to host a dinner to bring Madison and Hamilton together. Subsequently, a compromise was reached, in which the northern delegates would agree to the southerly Potomac River site, and in return, the federal government would assume debts accumulated by the states during the American Revolutionary War.” In 1791, Washington gave L’Enfant a commission to design DC. L’Enfant’s Plan, not clearly legible here, contains two buildings: Congress Hose and The White House (then before the British burnt it in the War of 1812 and it was repainted white) known as The President’s House.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz_8fq7lDcw

At the time, the freshly ratified Constitution made clear the Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court (in 1800 housed in the Capitol building and now across the street in a 20th Century columned building ). For L’Enfant, the Congress located on top and the hill and the President below, Congress seemed the more powerful.

Then, on March 3, 1993, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the imperial Presidency and each President since has made or attempted to make the Presidency more powerful and more dominant. President Trump has managed in his failed response to a deadly virus which yesterday infected 1,000 US Americans every minute has both failed as a leader in time of national crisis and succeeded as an autocrat to curb his irrational behavior including refusing to accept Congress’ Constitutionally authorized power to issue subpoenas to review the activities of federal agencies under his control. Why this issue of leadership is of critical importance to global architects is the reason for today’s column.

Bottom line: Former Obama Vice President Joe Biden will be elected President of the United States and current US Senator Kamala Harris of California will be elected Vice President. They will win overwhelming not only in the popular vote which President Donald Trump lost in 2016, but also in the electoral college, which the aristocratically-minded framers of the Constitution of the United States (ratified in 1792) decided was a necessary protection against mob rule and which in a major shock made Trump President because a small number of votes in the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania,

Today’s column reports on how the Presidential and especially critical US Senate election—where Covid 19 pandemic which has killed over 218,000 of our people have died, as of yesterday, https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+many+us+dead+from+covid

This US Special election focuses on how you, my architect, engineers, and those in the construction industry readers must instantly drop everything to prepare housing for the most vulnerable in our society, the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the homeless, agricultural workers, and inmates in jails and prisons must be housed and have home office space in the years–yes years–ahead. This, dear readers, is how you must your your talents and skills to control this plague which has killed as of yesterday, 1.18 million million people in the world.

Here in the dangerously isolationist US, the federal government==principal;y through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (but also through the the US Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Veterans Affairs et cetera must spend billions of dollars–probably billions to create a future safe from cornoavirus and the dangers respectred epidemiologist of ever more deadly viruses to come.

“In the long run,” the great economist John Maynard Keynes said, “we are all dead.” In the interim, you in the AEC Community must use your skills–which include 3-D modeling, building information modeling, town planning–to convince the heads of federal governments in Washington, London, Paris, Tokyo, Nairobi to spend what will clearly be (at whatever gargantuan amount) limited funds to spend it properly. No more must architects wait to apply for grants. You must actively design the whole process i.e. the planning before money is spent. To that, architects must eschew the neutral “I am above politics” conceit which unless you become political will result in avoidable deaths.

I cannot tell you how to exert influence in London now, because UK politics is not my metier. US politics is and has been since I was one year old abd a princpal factor in my parent’s divorce was the divisive 1948 election when Harry Truman surprised everyone and won.

This now classic photo in the public domain showing the victor Harry S Truman holding up a newspaper reporting incorrectly that the assumed favorite New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey had won.

Publishable in accordance with YouTube guidelines and a necessary part of the preparation planning process for architects who must get involved with President Elect Biden’s November to January transition process on housing and to provide the new President with First 100 Day vulnerable housing action items. Please start thinking of Joe as your client. Strut your stuff.